A pause. The weighted silence seems to stifle one.
"Eleanor Whitcomb Mertoun!"
A roar shatters the air—or is it the roof?—a shout of generous gladness mingled with the hearty clamour of hand and heel. The pent-up eagerness to know is changed into the longing to honour the chosen candidate, and it bursts forth and swirls tumultuously about Eleanor like the Fundy tide. It rises, falls, rises again, twenty feet at a leap.
Marjorie is meantime pounding Eleanor's knee, and exclaiming to every one within reach, "I knew it! I knew it!" as though some especial credit were due her for having been told the secret. Kate Murray, on the other side, was dragging Eleanor down by the neck, as if she would unseat from its firm base the head whose market value had risen 100% in five minutes.
Decorum returns for a moment when the President dismisses the students with the request that they sing the college hymn; and they sing it as can only those that have felt the "gracious inspiration" of our "Mistress and Mother." When it is over, there is a rush for Lee Mertoun from all sides, for it is de rigueur to shake the new Fellow's hand very nearly to the maiming of that revered member. For ten minutes she clasps hands, hardly recognizing their owners in the press; and then gradually, as the bell rings for first lectures, the crowd melts out of the chapel.
As Lee, Marjorie, Kate, and Carroll left the room Marjorie ran her arm through that of the warm and red recipient of blushing honours and facing her quickly about, pointed tragically with her pen at the almost deserted confusion of chairs helplessly awry.
"There, woman," she said, "a picture of that might with great plausibility be labelled 'Charleston after the Earthquake.' That is all your fault, and it is what you have got to live up to."
Eleanor laughed. "If that were all!" she said.
"You are right—there is more," retorted Marjorie, putting her own construction upon Eleanor's words. "You have to live this thing down as well as live up to it. And that means you will have to work hard to convince the infidels that you are still in the crusade, and that you stand for something besides the midnight oil. Now if you have yourself well in hand after all this agitation, let's go to Latin." So the four seniors wended their way through the small groups that were still "talking it over," Marjorie declaring that she simply must cut her own lecture and go with Lee to Major Latin, in order to see how to treat a Fellow.