It was impossible not to notice it. The girl called Jack (Gloria later heard Miss Alton give her Jacquinot) did talk incessantly in a voice that intruded everywhere, and as she promenaded up and down, dragging along a timid new girl called Ethel, the “get up” Pat mentioned was equally intrusive. A glaring, tiger-lily red baronet skirt, a black silk sweater and colorful bobbed hair. Dangling from her neck was a string of varied colored wooden beads with which she toyed constantly.
The string of beads reminded Gloria of the mistaken trunk.
“Is she a—stranger?” she asked Pat.
“Somewhat. That is, she comes and goes. I wonder Miss Alton admits her. Jack never settles down to anything serious. She makes me think of a big butterfly.”
“The black and yellow kind.”
“Uh-huh!” conceded Pat.
A call to the opening chorus within the assembly room was reluctantly obeyed. “Hail, Altmount,” composed by a brilliant but unpopular girl of the graduating class two years back, was murmured, mumbled and otherwise abused. The faculty chimed in with more enthusiasm than voice, and eventually the wail ended.
“Oh, let’s sing the regular college songs,” proposed Jack, slamming a yellow book on the piano rack in front of demure Miss Taylor.
But the majority of the girls, the great majority, deserted, and left few with Jack and timid Ethel to “try” the regular college songs. No one seemed to have a voice or there was something seriously wrong with the tunes, for one after the other they were “tried,” until the long suffering Miss Taylor proposed a truce.
“Jack doesn’t seem to be very popular,” ventured Gloria to the giggling Pat, when the trials were all over.