“Le Grand, that’s a good name for her,” laughed Judy, sniffing at the perfumed paper with some disgust.
But she wrote an elaborate report regarding the incident and read it aloud to the assembled G. F.’s at their second meeting.
In the meantime, Sallie Marks had her innings with the redoubtable Frances, and retreated, wearing the sad and martyred smile of one who is determined not to resent an insult. One by one the G.F.’s took occasion to be polite and kind to the scornful, suspicious Frances. Her malicious speeches were ignored and her vulgarities—and she had many of them—passed lightly over. Little by little she arrived at the conclusion that refinement did not mean priggishness and that vulgarity was not humor. Of course the change came very gradually. Not infrequently after a sophomore snub, the whipped dog snarled savagely; or she would brazenly try to shock the supper table with a coarse, slangy speech. But with the persistent friendliness of the Queen’s girls, the fires in her nature began to die down and the intervals between flare-ups grew longer each day.
Frances Andrews was the first “subject” of the G.F.’s, and they were as interested in her regeneration as a group of learned doctors in the recovery of a dangerously ill patient.
In the meantime, the busy college life hummed on and Molly felt her head swimming sometimes with its variety and fullness. What with coaching Judy, blacking boots, making certain delicious sweetmeats called “cloudbursts,”—the recipe of which was her own secret,—which sold like hot cakes; keeping up the social end and the study end, Molly was beginning to feel tired. A wanness began to show in the dark shadows under her eyes and the pinched look about her lips even as early as the eventful evening when she posed for the senior living picture show.
“This child needs some make-up,” the august senior president had exclaimed. “Where’s the rouge and who’s got my rabbit’s foot? No, burned cork makes too broad a line. Give me one of the lighter colored eyebrow pencils. You mustn’t lose your color, little girl,” she said, dabbing a spot of red on each of Molly’s pale cheeks. “Your roses are one of your chief attractions.”
A great many students and some of the faculty had bought tickets for this notable occasion, and the gymnasium was well filled before the curtain was drawn back from a gigantic gold frame disclosing Mary Stewart as Joan of Arc in the picture by Bastien Le Page, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There was no attempt to reproduce the atmospheric visions of the angel and the knight in armor, only the poor peasant girl standing in the cabbage patch, her face transfigured with inspiration. When Molly saw Mary Stewart pose in this picture at the dress rehearsal, she could not help recalling the story of the bootblack father.
“She has a wonderful face, and I call it beautiful, if other people don’t,” she said to herself.
As for our little freshman, so dazed and heavy was she with fatigue, the night of the entertainment, that she never knew she had created a sensation, first as Botticelli’s “Flora,” barefooted and wearing a Greek dress constructed of cheesecloth, and then as “Mrs. Hamilton,” in the blue crepe with a gauzy fichu around her neck.
After the exhibition, when all the actors were endeavoring to collect their belongings in the confusion of the green room, Sallie Marks came running behind the scenes.