Did Gertrude ever tell you about our playing at politics when we were sophomores? Possibly you have heard politics defined as present history, and history as past politics. On that understanding, this tale is a history. It is the history of a great reform. When I sit down to reflect, a luxury for which I seldom have time even in vacation, it really seems to me that I have been reforming all my life. Lila has reformed a good deal since she entered college, and Berta has been almost as bad as I. Robbie Belle is the best one among us, but she does not realize it. That is the reason why she is such a dear. She never preaches—that is, never unless it is her plain duty as at that time in the north tower, when we were freshmen, you remember. If she disapproves of any of our schemes, she simply says she doesn’t want to do it. That was what she said when the rest of us proposed to masquerade as a gang of wardheelers on election day.
You know what wardheelers are, I suppose. They are politicians who hang around the polls and watch the voting and see that people vote for the right party, or the wrong party, for the matter of that. It all depends on which side they belong. When they notice anybody going to vote for the other side, they sort of intimidate him, tell him to get away, or else push him out of line or punch him in the head or something like that. Sometimes they stuff the ballot-boxes, too, or go from one poll to another, voting over and over.
Now Robbie Belle had joined in with all the other fun that autumn. There were imitation rallies and parades and receptions to candidates and mock banquets with real speeches and fudges and crackers to eat. She made a perfectly splendid presidential candidate at one of the meetings. She looked ever so much like him too as she sat gravely on the platform with her hair parted on one side, and a borrowed silk hat clasped to the bosom of her brother’s dress suit. When all at once her face crinkled in a sudden irresistible smile, even the seniors said she was dear. But this time she said she’d rather not be a wardheeler. She wouldn’t come to a banquet of the gang the night before election day either. She said she guessed she didn’t want to.
Berta and Lila and I collected butter and sugar and milk at the dinner table that evening. In our dormitory we are allowed to carry away bread and milk to our rooms, but we are not supposed to take sugar or butter for fudges. That seemed awfully stingy to us then; for in the pantry there were barrels of sugar, great cans of milk, hundreds and thousands of little yellow butterballs piled on big platters. We thought it wouldn’t do any harm to use a tiny bit of it all for our banquet.
At dinner I slid two butterballs into my glass of milk, and Lila filled her glass with sugar from the bowl and then poured enough milk over it to hide the grainy look. Robbie Belle kept her eyes in another direction, but Berta said we had a right to one of the balls anyhow, because she had not eaten butter all day. Berta is the brightest girl in the class and she can argue about everything, and let the other person choose her side of the question first too. It was not until later that she reformed from that tendency to juggle with her intellect, as Prexie calls it.
Well, Lila and I marched down the long dining-room, past the seniors and the faculty table, with our glasses held up in plain sight. As soon as we reached the corridor in unmolested safety, Lila gave a skip so joyous that some drops spattered on the floor.
She said, “Nobody caught us that time.”
“Hush!” I jogged her elbow so that unluckily more milk splashed on the rubber matting, “there’s Martha.”
Martha, you know—or probably you don’t know until I tell you—was a freshman who roomed with Lila and me that year. She was the dearest little conscientious child with big eyes that were always staring at us solemnly and giving me the shivers. She appeared to think so much more than she spoke that we respected her a lot and tried to set her a good example.