Jacquette,
A Sorority Girl

Little by little the story of the evening came out

Jacquette
A Sorority Girl

BY
GRACE ETHELWYN CODY

ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES JOHNSON POST

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1908

Copyright, 1908
By DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Published 1908

THE PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

To
My Mother

CONTENTS

Jacquette, A Sorority Girl

CHAPTER I
JACQUETTE

IT was nine o’clock in the evening when a heavy train rolled into the Union Station of a great western city. Among the passengers to alight was a fair-haired girl who glanced timidly about the big, cavernous station before falling in with the procession of travellers that had begun to move toward the waiting-room. Suddenly, one face shone clearly from among the indiscriminate mass of faces outside the iron gates, and she gave a glad little cry, as a tall boy stepped forward, caught her suitcase from her, and grasped her hand.

“Jacquette, isn’t it?” he exclaimed, his dark eyes shining with welcome. “I’d know you anywhere from your pictures.”

“But I shouldn’t know you!” she answered. “I’d no idea you were so big and—and grand!” she finished, roguishly.

“As for that, I am rather grand, to-night,” he laughed, stealing admiring glances at her as he led the way through the crowded station to the street. “I’m down here in the governor’s new auto to meet a long-lost country cousin, and I find a fairy princess, instead. What more could a fellow ask?”

“Not an automobile! Truly? I’ve never been in one, yet.”

“Oh, well, you’ll do a lot of things in Channing that you never did in Brookdale. Here’s the machine. Just step in and be comfortable while I look after your baggage.”

He gave an order to the respectful chauffeur and disappeared into the station, while Jacquette Willard looked after him, feeling that she had suddenly entered a new world. She sat up very straight, brushing a bit of lint from the jacket of her wine-coloured travelling-gown, and, more than once, she patted the sunny mist of hair about her face, and put both hands to the jaunty hat, to make sure that it was poised exactly as it should be. In a few minutes her tall cousin came back and seated himself beside her, and then they went spinning along the brilliantly lighted streets toward her uncle’s home.

“It seems like a fairy story to me, Quis,” she said, looking up at him with a shy smile.

“Didn’t I tell you you were the princess?” Marquis answered gaily. “Do you know?—there’s a pink rose in our conservatory that looks just like you, only it lacks the eyes—poor rose! Your pictures showed your hair was curly, but they didn’t tell the gold colour of it, and those stunning braids didn’t show, either. Wonder if the girls will make you put up your hair?”

“What girls?”

“Oh, the bunch I’ll show you, to-morrow morning. Nicest girls in Marston High.”

“High school, do you mean?”

“Yes; we never stop to put on the school, though. Everybody knows Marston. It’s famous all through the west for its football team. I’m mighty glad you came while I’m a senior here, instead of waiting till next year when I’ll be off at college. I can give you no end of pointers. By the way, I liked it just now, when you said ‘Quis.’ I suppose you know about your mother and my father getting our Frenchy sounding names out of the same old novel? Funny, wasn’t it? I have to answer to ‘Markee’ about half the time. The fellows do it to guy me. I wonder what you’d think if I should call you ‘Jack’?”

“I’d like it,” she agreed, promptly. “I never had a nickname.”

“All right, that’s settled. Don’t you think it’s queer we feel so well acquainted, just from the letters we’ve written? Do you realise that it’s twelve years since I even saw you? We lived abroad ten whole years, you know. Mother was saying, last night, that I’d spent two years more of my life in Europe than in this country, so far. I’m a pretty good American, though, for all that. The last two years here in Channing seem worth more than the whole ten on the other side. My father feels the same way, too, and he’s mighty happy to think that you and Aunt Sula and grandfather are coming to live so near us.”

“And perhaps we’re not happy about it too! You ought to hear the plans Aunt Sula and I have made for this winter. We’re going to make the most of the chance to hear good music, and see all the exhibitions at the Art Institute, for one thing.”

“Whew! How cultured we are!”

“We aren’t, yet, but wait!” Jacquette laughed. Then she added, seriously, “Our plans aren’t all selfish, though. We’re hoping we can interest grandfather in some of the new things, and make him happier. He has been so lonely since grandmother died, Quis.”

“I suppose he has. How soon are they coming?”

“Oh, it will be six weeks or two months before Aunt Sula can settle up things and leave Brookdale. I ought to be there to help her, but she was so anxious to have me begin school the first day that she made me come.”

“Then you’re going to stay at our house six weeks or more. That’s great. Perhaps you’ll make up your mind to live with us all the time after this.”

“Aunt Sula wouldn’t hear of that,” Jacquette said, smiling. “She thinks I belong to her as much as if I were her very own daughter. I guess I do, too. She’s taken care of me ever since I was three years old, you know.”

“Three!” Marquis repeated, in a softened tone. “Were you that little when your father and mother died, Jack?”

She nodded, a wistful look creeping into the hazel eyes, and they were both silent for a little. The automobile had turned on to a fashionable boulevard, and was skimming along like the wind. Presently a grey stone house loomed before them.

“Here we are!” cried Marquis—and, a minute later, Uncle Mac and Aunt Fanny were welcoming the Brookdale niece to their city home.

Aunt Fanny was tall and distinguished looking. Quis was like her; Jacquette saw that at a glance. Uncle Mac was stout and blue-eyed—and dear and kind.

After the first greetings he held his niece off at arm’s length, and looked deep into her eyes.

“Your mother’s own girl,” he said, with a mist in his voice. “Fanny, let’s keep her for ours after this.”

“At any rate, we shall be very glad to keep her for ours until Father Granville and Sula come, Malcolm,” Aunt Fanny answered in even tones, and Jacquette, glancing shyly up at the white profile of her statuesque, dark-haired aunt, felt, suddenly, that she knew who ruled her uncle’s home.

Mrs. Malcolm Granville was a woman who prided herself on her practical common sense, and, though she was very willing to receive Jacquette into her luxurious home for a visit, she had no intention of allowing her husband to put any foolish ideas, even for a minute, into the mind of his niece. As she reasoned, Jacquette, with the modest inheritance left to her by her father, was very suitably placed in the unpretentious home of her grandfather and unmarried aunt, and there was no good reason for saying or doing anything which might cause her to feel discontented with this arrangement.

As a matter of fact, there was not the slightest danger. Jacquette was too devotedly attached to her adopted mother to consider, for a moment, the thought of leaving her, and she felt an impulse to tell Aunt Fanny so on the spot, but she controlled it, and, after a few days, she learned, as people always did, to make allowances for Aunt Fanny’s “way,” and to appreciate her kindness, in spite of it.

“Now I’m going to carry this girl straight off to bed,” Aunt Fanny declared, presently, after Jacquette, relieved of her wraps and seated in a rocker before the fireplace in the library, had been served with a dainty tray of refreshments. “You see she can’t eat a mouthful, even though she confesses to not having taken dinner on the train. I believe she has swallowed three sips of milk and one nibble of that roll, altogether. She’s tired and excited, and the longer she stays here answering your questions, Malcolm, the more tired she’ll be.”

“Oh, mother, it’s disgracefully early!” Marquis protested, but Uncle Malcolm, leaning back in his big leather chair, smiled good-naturedly.

“Guess you’re right, Fanny,” he agreed. “If she’s going to begin school to-morrow morning, the sooner those pretty eyes are shut, the better.”

“There won’t be any school-work to speak of, the first day—nothing but fun—and I had forty things more to say to her,” Marquis was still grumbling as he rose to say good-night, but his mother’s word was law, and even Marquis grudgingly admitted her wisdom, next morning, when he saw the bright, rosy girl that emerged from the good night’s rest. As he started for school with Jacquette, after breakfast, he turned and looked her over with a smile of satisfaction.

“Well, what is it? Country cousin?” she asked him, saucily.

“Not much! I meant ‘fairy princess’ when I said it. I was just thinking that if your dress were an inch or two longer, you’d look precious little like a freshy.”

“There’s a double hem in all of them, to let out if I need to,” Jacquette confided to him, “but Aunt Sula thought they were long enough for fifteen.”

“Oh, well, the Sigma Pi girls will post you on all those matters.”

“The Sigma what?”

“That’s your sorority—Sigma Pi Epsilon. I’ve arranged with the girls to rush you, first thing, and they’re sure to bid you in a few days.”

“To bid me?”

“I’ll bet you don’t know what a sorority is! Oh, Brookdale, Brookdale! Think of a fairy princess buried in Brookdale! Why, every high school worthy of the name, nowadays, has its Greek-letter societies, and at Marston, we have more fraternities and sororities than I could tell you about in an hour. The only ones worth mentioning, though, are the ones with national charters. The little local ones are punk. The people that can’t make the nationals, go into them. But it goes without saying that the sorority I’m going to get you into is the most exclusive set in the school. Wait till you see the girls.”

“Why, Quis, I do know about secret societies in schools. I’ve read a lot about the teachers opposing them.”

“Yes, I suppose you have—but they haven’t any right to do it. Is it their business to forbid our joining a club, provided our parents are willing? As for the Channing Board of Education, I guess we’ve hushed it up for one while. It made a rule, last year, shutting off fraternity and sorority members from a lot of high school privileges—trying to freeze out secret societies that way, you see—and we just took up a collection and hired a first-class lawyer and got an injunction against their enforcing that rule. They haven’t any legal right to do such a thing.”

Jacquette listened with a growing sense of her own lack of information. “But don’t you think there’s anything, then, in all this fuss about fraternities making class distinctions in school?” she asked cautiously.

“Not a thing! I’ll tell you how it is: All the fellows that are really worth anything get into some fraternity or other—and the same with the girls.”

They turned a corner and came within sight of Marston High School. It was a large grey stone building, rising abruptly from the street and separated from it only by two railed-in grass plots, one on each side of the walk leading to the main entrance. A few scrub oaks, straggling relics of the old forest which had once flourished where the hurrying, striving city now stood, shaded the windows at the south, but, except for these, everything was bare—as different as possible from the pleasant grounds surrounding the little Brookdale school.

“Oh, are we here?” Jacquette cried. “I wanted to ask you about planning my course, Quis.”

“Lots of time for that,” he told her. “You won’t do a thing but be rushed, to-day.”

“And just what is being ‘rushed,’ please?”

“Here’s somebody that will show you,” he answered, coming to a sudden stop on the sidewalk in front of the school building, where a group of girls were talking together.

They greeted Marquis gaily, and Jacquette’s name had hardly been pronounced before they came fluttering about her like butterflies. After a minute, Marquis laughingly withdrew, promising to look her up later.

Jacquette had never experienced anything like this. She was flattered and petted, her “beautiful braids” envied, her “lovely colour” raved over, while she was being presented to this and that girl, and yielded reluctantly by one to the other, until she had met about twenty.

There the introductions stopped. Plenty of other girls and boys were standing about, or passing in and out of the school building, but it was evident that she was to meet no one outside of this particular set, to-day. She was satisfied, though, for she had begun to believe what Marquis had said about these being the nicest girls in Marston High.

As she stood there in the warm September sunshine, she found herself taking notes of the silk and muslin gowns worn by these new friends, and of the elaborate styles of hair-dressing. One richly-dressed girl, who had been introduced as Blanche Gross, was describing a forty-dollar hat that she had bought “just to wear in the house, at teas and receptions.” Jacquette, fresh from Brookdale, wondered what Aunt Sula would say to that. She wished Quis had told her that hats were not worn outdoors in Channing. Not one of the girls had any covering on her head.

The chatter about her went on merrily. Now and then a new girl was brought into the charmed circle, and passed around, just as Jacquette had been, but no one seemed to think of going into school. Jacquette did not quite understand; she was only sure that it was all fascinating, and that she was glad to be a part of it.

“Don’t we go in to see about our classes, pretty soon?” she asked, presently, of Louise Markham, a jolly, stylish-looking senior in a white linen suit, who seemed to have taken her especially under her wing.

“Oh, no!”—Etta Brainerd, the talkative girl of the crowd spoke before Louise could answer—“Sorority girls never register until second day.”

“But we may have to reform our ways in that respect, girls,” laughed Louise. “Did you know the Board of Education took off five teachers from Marston faculty, last year, because the enrollment of pupils on the first day was only a thousand? Next day, you know, after the rest of us had registered, there were nearly fifteen hundred, and the teachers didn’t like it a bit. It made their work so much harder.”

“Oh, they always fuss about something,” said Etta, carelessly. “We have to take care of the interests of our sorority, first day. Guess we aren’t going to let the Kappa Delts run off with the best girls, while we’re registering!”

Etta was the tallest girl in the group. Her brown hair was drawn to the top of her head in a fluffy knot, and her skirts almost touched the ground. As she spoke, she was readjusting the sorority pin on the front of her white lace waist. “It has to be exactly over the heart,” she explained, with a smile, as she saw Jacquette watching her.

“We’re going to have a spread after a while, and we want you to come,” Louise murmured to Jacquette. “That’s what ‘rushing’ means. Quis said I should tell you. We pick out the girls we think we may want, and give them a good time—spreads and so on—and then, if we find they’re all right, we bid them Sigma Pi—ask them to join, you know.”

But while Louise was speaking, Jacquette had suddenly recognised a girl who had spent the summer with an aunt in Brookdale, a few years earlier.

“Margaret Howland!” she cried, darting forward and catching her by the arm.

“Jacquette Willard! Where did you drop down from?”

Jacquette wondered, as she explained, at the curious expression which crossed Margaret’s face. “I never dreamed you went to this school,” Jacquette finished. “I was going to look you up the first chance I had, but now we’ll see each other every day. Isn’t it splendid?”

“Yes, I’m awfully glad to see you, but——” Margaret hesitated.

“‘But,’ you’re so big you can’t play with a little freshy?”

“No, indeed! But I’m afraid, if Quis Granville is your cousin——”

“Jack!” a surprised voice interrupted, and, turning, Jacquette found Quis looking down at her in unmistakable disapproval. “Good morning, Miss Howland,” he added, lifting his cap to Margaret. “Excuse my cousin, will you? Some of the girls want her.”

It was done in a twinkling. Margaret was swallowed up in the bevy of girls who had gathered about while she talked with Jacquette, and Marquis carried off his cousin in gleeful triumph.

“What in the world!” he began, as soon as they were out of earshot. “How did she ever get you?”

“Get me? What do you mean?” Jacquette protested. “That’s Margaret Howland—a darling girl I knew in Brookdale, three years ago.”

“The mischief you did! She’s one of the strongest workers in Kappa Delta, and you mustn’t have a thing to do with her at this stage of the game, or you’ll lose all your chances with the Sigma Pi girls. Now, mind, Jack, you’re new here. I know the ground and you won’t be sorry if you take my advice. My frat is Beta Sigma, the best in school—hardest to get into, finest frat house, highest dues, and all that. The only sorority that ranks with it is Sigma Pi Epsilon. I want you to have the best. Understand?” And, as he ended, he handed her over to Louise Markham, whose laugh had rippled out gaily when she saw them coming.

“I’ll not let her get away again,” she told Marquis, her dark eyes twinkling as she put one arm around Jacquette. “We love her too much, already, to trust her in the enemy’s camp.”

“Indeed we do!” chorussed half a dozen girls, gathering about, and, before she realised what was happening, Jacquette had been bewitched into forgetting all about Margaret.

The morning passed, and when the noon hour came, the girls adjourned to the Sigma Pi spread. It was given at Etta Brainerd’s house, and Jacquette found that it meant sandwiches and salads, hot chocolate, olives, cake, ice-cream and candy, all served picnic fashion, with sorority songs, and laughter and chatter. When the party dispersed, late in the afternoon, some one whispered to Jacquette that she was to stay, and, as soon as the other guests had gone, the Sigma Pi girls gathered about and told her that they had decided to ask her to join their sorority.

Then Louise Markham, who had completely won Jacquette’s heart, walked home with her to tell Quis what a success she had been with the girls, and to charge him that he must help her with an important letter which she was to write to her Aunt Sula that evening.

Accordingly, after dinner, Marquis and Jacquette retired to the library for consultation.

Jacquette took up a pen. “Tia Mia,” were the first words she wrote.

“What’s that?” Quis demanded, looking over her shoulder.

“Tee-ah mee-ah,” pronounced Jacquette. “It’s Spanish for ‘my aunt.’ We found it in a book, and I thought it was cunning; so ‘Tia’ has been my pet name for Aunt Sula ever since.”

“Oh! Well, go on,” Quis consented, and after much re-writing, this was the letter they sent:

“Tia Mia,

“The first day at school has been simply glorious and now I have a great favour to ask. Don’t refuse it! I have been asked to join the nicest girls’ club in Marston High School. May I do it? Of course I’d rather wait till you are here and could know the girls, too, but Quis says I ought to accept when I’m asked, as it’s a great compliment, and they may never invite me again. It’s called a sorority—a sisterhood, you know—and it stands for the highest ideals in scholarship and everything else.

“Darling, please, please don’t make me lose this chance of being closely associated with the very best girls, just because you’re not here to judge for yourself. Trust me.

“I don’t know what the dues will be, but not large, Quis thinks, and I could pay them out of the money set aside for my education. It’s really a part of my high school education, they seem to think, here.

“Please say yes, dearest, and by return mail.

“Always the same love,

“Your Girl.”

CHAPTER II
MADEMOISELLE

NEXT morning dawned bright and clear—another day like midsummer—and, when Jacquette began to dress, a remark that Louise had made on the way home from the spread the night before, came into her mind.

“This is your travelling suit, isn’t it?” Louise had said. “It’s so appropriate—plain and dark! I love plain things for travelling, don’t you?”

With this in her thoughts, Jacquette discarded the simple shirt-waist suit she had intended to wear, and took out, instead, a fluffy rose-coloured mull, which Aunt Sula had advised her to put on often for dinner, while she was visiting at Uncle Malcolm’s.

She felt repaid for the change when she saw Aunt Fanny’s welcoming smile and Quis’s glance of admiration, at breakfast. Uncle Mac studied her without comment, but, just as she was starting for school, he put his arm around her and whispered, tenderly,

“Your mother’s own daughter—that’s what you are! Don’t let ’em spoil you with their secret societies and things. Keep your pretty head level.”

The pretty head, hatless this morning, nodded confidently as Jacquette tripped away at Marquis’s side.

Louise Markham joined them at the corner, and, a block or two farther on, Marquis excused himself to walk with a boy who had met them at one of the cross-streets.

“We needn’t feel jealous,” Louise said, with a smile, as Marquis left them. “It isn’t because he prefers Clarence Mullen’s company to ours.”

“What made him go, then?” Jacquette asked.

“Oh, business! The Beta Sigs want to pledge that little fellow, and two or three other fraternities are after him, too, so Quis couldn’t lose this chance of courting him.”

“But, Louise, that boy has such a queer, sly-looking face! I thought so the minute I saw him. Is he nice?”

Louise shrugged her shoulders good-naturedly. “His father has loads of money and a ball-room in his house.”

“You don’t mean to say that Quis’s fraternity would choose a boy for those things?”

There was a scandalised note in Jacquette’s voice, and Louise laughed.

“Not really,” she said. “I don’t actually know anything against that Mullen boy, but somehow, I feel just as you do about him—creepy—and I can’t help thinking that his father’s financial position may have a little to do with all the fraternities rushing him so hard. Maybe that’s unjust. I don’t know—but I do know, Jacquette, that when a girl can look as much like a flower as you do in that pink dress, she has no business ever to wear plain things.”

“Oh, Louise!” Jacquette protested, looking more like a flower than ever, as they turned into the school entrance, and walked up to the office to register.

When they came out into the hall again, Louise said, “Well, you’re assigned to room 17, I see. That means you’re going to bloom in Mademoiselle’s rose-garden. I ’most wish I were a freshman or sophomore, so I could be there with you. We seniors have to go up on the top floor.”

“What is Mademoiselle’s rose garden?”

“Come in here and see,” was the answer, as Louise led Jacquette into room 17 and straight to Mademoiselle Dubois’s desk, where a half dozen pupils were standing in line, waiting for the French teacher to assign them seats in her study room.

Just as she was starting for school, Uncle Mac put his arms around her

Mademoiselle, a slight figure dressed in black, was writing busily, but, after a moment, she lifted her head and fixed a pair of searching eyes on Jacquette. Instantly, the girl was conscious of a forceful character, masked by a dimpling face, which revealed nothing.

“Jacquette Willard,” Mademoiselle repeated after Louise, in honeyed tones. “A little French name, is it not? But it is not a little French girl? No? Ah, a cousin of Marquis Granville, did you say? My cunning chicken, I am charmed to meet you! You are going to be my child, for I know your cousin well, and, indeed, I am so fond of that little wretch!”

Jacquette gasped, and, before she could stammer a word in reply, Louise’s laugh had bubbled forth.

“Your old abominable laugh, my sweet pet,” Mademoiselle chided, turning to Louise and speaking in the same mellifluous voice. “You have carried it through high school, and you will carry it into womanhood. It is scandalous, dearie. You shall have that seat next the aisle, my little plum-tree,” she added, addressing Jacquette again. “The one in the second row, honey, and Louise, the dear child, shall help you make out your programme for the quarter. You see that all the classes and all the hours are plainly written on the board, don’t you, dearie? Go now, Louise, and help the little Willard, before the bell rings.”

“There! How do you like Mademoiselle?” Louise whispered, as soon as they were seated. “All the other teachers in high school call you ‘Miss’—but not Mademoiselle! She makes you feel, just at first, as if you’d dropped back into kindergarten, but don’t deceive yourself—you haven’t! There isn’t a more respected, better obeyed teacher in Marston than Mademoiselle Dubois, and, as for French, what she doesn’t know about it isn’t worth learning. Did you notice how she spoke about my laugh? She’s just right. I can’t control it to save my life. But isn’t she great?”

“Great—I should think she was!” Jacquette agreed, impulsively. “I’m afraid of her and I like her at the same minute. ‘My cunning chicken’! Louise, I’ve had one year of French at home; I hope I can take my second year with her.”

“All right; let’s plan it that way.” And the girls fell to work on Jacquette’s programme.

Tap, tap, tap, sounded on Mademoiselle’s desk, when they had nearly finished.

“Now, my little flock,” said the small Frenchwoman, standing behind her desk to address the roomful of fifty young people, whose ages ranged from fifteen to eighteen. “My sweet pets”—she paused and dimpled—“at the beginning of the year, I will explain to you the meaning of the bells. You see, I never have the least particle of trouble with the dear children who study in my room—not the least particle—after I have once explained the meaning of the bells. It is this: First bell, no walking; second bell, no talking; and third bell”—her voice had dropped almost to a whisper—“when the third bell rings, in Mademoiselle’s room, it is always as still as a little rose garden!”

“What did I tell you?” murmured Louise. “See how they strain their ears to catch every word she says.”

“If I hear any voice,” Mademoiselle’s hushed tones went on, after she had cast one keen glance at Louise, “if there is ever any sound at all, I know it must be an echo from that bad room across the hall, for my children never give me the least particle of trouble—the sweet pets!

“Very good. You are just as I knew you would be, dear children. Now, Alice, honey, when you registered yesterday, did you not ask to be excused from drawing, this quarter?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle Dubois,” answered a tall, serious looking sophomore, who had evidently met Mademoiselle, before.

“Well, sweet pet, did you bring your note of excuse from mamma, to-day?”

“No, Mademoiselle, I forgot it.”

“I am so sorry, Alice, because you see, dearie, you must go right home after it, and that means you will miss the first and second period—both recitations for you—and that means”—lingeringly and lovingly—“that means two—little—zeros! And you see, Alice, that it always pays, in Mademoiselle’s room, for her dear little peacocks to do everything just at the right little minute, because, if they don’t, it means t-r-o-t, trot!”

She pointed a tiny finger at the door, and, to Jacquette’s wondering amazement, tall Alice meekly departed.

As the door closed behind her, Mademoiselle assumed a meditative expression. “There are three people talking in this room at present,” she said softly, addressing a distant spot on the ceiling. “I am one of them; I wonder who the other two could be! Chester!” she added, suddenly, fixing her eyes on a corner of the room where a sly whispering was in progress. “Take your books, honey, and come to this row at once. No, not there,” she demurred, as the big, broad-shouldered fellow sheepishly obeyed. “I reserve those seats for my French class, and if you should be studying there, and I should imagine you were one of my French class who was not paying attention, you might get your sweet little ears boxed! Now, as I was about to say, when I was so rudely interrupted——”

But the things Mademoiselle wished to say had to be postponed, for the bell sounded, and the pupils of her second year French class—some from her own room, and some from other rooms—began to assemble in the front rows. Louise gave Jacquette’s hand a farewell squeeze, and hurried away to a class of her own on the upper floor, while Jacquette, left alone for the first time, shyly took her place among Mademoiselle’s pupils, wondering, as she did so, whether she was likely to get her “sweet little ears boxed” by sitting at the wrong desk.

The French recitation proved to be a taking of stock, by Mademoiselle, of her class’s stage of advancement, but it served, at the same time, to fix in the minds of those who had not worked with her before, the necessity of keeping eyes and ears open.

Early in the hour, she called on Arline Grant, a much be-curled young lady, to give the rule under which a certain word preceded the verb in a French sentence they were discussing.

Arline was silent.

“Class,” said Mademoiselle, “We will sing for Arline a little song that we learned at the beginning of our first year in French. All together, ready! First verse” (chanting): “Pronoun objects come before the verb! Second verse: Pronoun objects come before the verb! Third verse: Pronoun objects come before the verb! Chorus: Pronoun objects come before the verb! Now, Arline, do you know the little rule, my pet?”

Arline gave it.

“Triumph No. 1!” Mademoiselle exclaimed brightly. “We have taught Arline something!” Then she looked sharply at her book, and said in a surprised tone, “I notice ‘mon amie’ printed in the next sentence! ‘Mon’—a masculine pronoun—when the ‘friend’ referred to is feminine. A misprint, is it not? Scratch it out, everyone of you, and write the feminine ‘ma’ in its place.”

The pupils obediently made the change.

“Class, rise,” Mademoiselle commanded, and the class rose.

“Now, all who scratched that out, sit down,” she continued, and everyone except Jacquette sat down.

“My little Willard!” said Mademoiselle, in evident surprise. “What are you walking around here for?”

“Because I didn’t scratch it out,” Jacquette replied, blushing furiously.

“And why not?” The deep dimples appeared in Mademoiselle’s cheeks.

“Because the pronoun ‘mon’ retains the masculine form before a feminine noun beginning with a vowel or h mute,” Jacquette faltered, frightened almost out of her voice at finding herself the only one who knew it.

“Excellent, dearie! I am charmed! You may be seated. And for the rest of you—zero!” Mademoiselle pronounced, dramatically. “I don’t wonder you look chagrined, my pets,” she added, “but you must remember that, in Mademoiselle Dubois’s classes, it pays to keep your wits about you.”

“Well, Mademoiselle,” one of the boys protested, with a shamefaced grin, “it’s mighty hard for us to keep track of all those little things. Now, there’s another point bothers me; the same word has so many different meanings in French. How are we going to tell them apart?”

“Honey, how can I bear to have you ask me so many silly questions!” Mademoiselle answered, instantly, folding her arms high on her chest as she spoke. “Now, listen: There is a big—black—animal, with long—fuzzy—hair, which our President loves to shoot—alas! Do you know the two meanings I gave to the word ‘bear’ in that remark?”

“Why, y-yes,” Clarence stammered, “The way you used it shows.”

Mademoiselle suddenly waved her hand at him as one tosses farewell to a baby. “Also in French, honey!” she told him, brightly.

All this was very entertaining to Jacquette, so much so that her algebra class, which met in the next hour and was taught by the dignified Mr. Pettingill, might have seemed dull except for the fact that she sat next to Etta Brainerd, who wrote her note after note and slipped them into her hand during the class period.

It seemed, Jacquette learned while Mr. Pettingill imagined he was teaching her algebra, that the Kappa Deltas were extremely anxious to get her into their sorority, on account of Margaret Howland’s former friendship with her, and that they were planning to ask her to their spread that afternoon. To outwit them, the Sigma Pi girls proposed to put their colours—pale blue and gold—on Jacquette, even before her Aunt Sula’s consent should come. In that way she could appear to be already pledged to them, and could have a good reason for declining the Kappa Delta’s invitation.

As soon as the half-hour for luncheon came, the Sigma Pi girls gathered around Jacquette.

“We’re not asking you to sign the pledge without your guardian’s permission, you understand, dear,” said Louise Markham, holding the blue and gold ribbons in one hand and the enamelled pledge pin in the other. “You simply promise, by wearing our colours this way, that if you ever do go any sorority, it will be Sigma Pi.”

And the end of it was that, when a delegation of Kappa Deltas, headed by Margaret Howland, came after Jacquette, a few minutes later, they found her wearing the blue and gold.

“I’m dreadfully sorry we can’t be in the same sorority,” she told Margaret, honestly, “but my cousin thinks——”

“That’s just why I want you to meet our girls,” Margaret argued. “Your cousin isn’t giving you a chance to judge for yourself.”

“That will do, Margaret!” exclaimed Etta Brainerd, stepping out of the close background, where she had been lingering to protect the Sigma Pi “pledge.” “I hate to say anything, because I know Jacquette used to think a great deal of you, but you know as well as anyone that it isn’t honourable to try to get another sorority’s pledge to come to your spreads.”

Then, without giving Jacquette time to do more than cast an apologetic backward glance at Margaret, Etta carried her off out of harm’s way.

Marquis was delighted, that night, when he saw the Sigma Pi colours pinned over Jacquette’s heart, and heard her story of the day.

“You did exactly right,” he told her. “It shows the Kappa Delts, once for all, just where you stand, and another thing I like about it is that it proves the Sigma Pi girls are dead anxious to get you. Oh, you’re all right, fairy princess!”

And Jacquette glowed with pleasure at his words.

The hours dragged slowly for a few days, after that, in spite of all the absorbing new happenings. It was because Aunt Sula’s answer was being waited for, but it came, at last, and Jacquette waved it wildly out of her bedroom window at Louise Markham, who happened to be passing.

“Louise! Louise! She says yes!” she cried, joyfully.

“Hurrah!” Louise called back. “I can’t stop, now, but I’m proper glad. A delegation of us will be over to-night to pledge you, dear.”

Then Jacquette sat down alone and read Aunt Sula’s “yes” all through again.

“About the girls’ club you speak of,” the letter said, “If it really must be decided before I come, I am going to leave it to you. You are almost a woman, now, and must begin to make your own decisions.

“I am assuming, of course, that Uncle Mac and Aunt Fanny approve, but, at the same time, I want you to use your own mind—not theirs—in forming your opinion. Find out, definitely, about the expense connected with it, and be sure, from all standpoints, that you are not doing anything you may regret later.

“Loving you always,

“Tia.”

CHAPTER III
TIA

“WHO mended the rip in my glove?” Jacquette demanded, as she stood in her coat and hat, ready to start for school. “Tia, you angel! Stop hiding behind that paper!”

A pair of brown eyes laughed over the top of the newspaper. Then a slight woman in a dark red morning gown, emerged into sight. “I do feel guilty,” she admitted, roguishly. “I ought to have trained you so well that you’d have mended it yourself.”

“Oh, I think you’ve done pretty well, considering the material you had to work on,” was the light-hearted answer, and Jacquette stopped to rearrange her hat before the mantel mirror as she spoke. “You don’t know how afraid I was all day yesterday that some of the sorority girls would call me to account for that glove! They’re frightfully particular about such things.”

“Do they mind little things like a button missing from a shoe?” Aunt Sula asked, demurely. “If they do, I think I’ll petition them to labour with someone I know.”

“Oh, dear, does that show? I didn’t think it could with this long dress. It seems to me I can’t get time to do the things I ought to.”

Two months of school had gone, and Jacquette was living, with her grandfather and Aunt Sula, in a comfortable little home only a few blocks from Malcolm Granville’s large one. The pearl-set blue and gold pin, worn over her heart, proclaimed that she had been initiated into her sorority, and her beautiful hair, tucked up in the back of her neck, and thoroughly hidden by the conventional big bow, was witness to the fact that the Sigma Pi girls considered long, curly braids too childish.

Not only had all the dresses brought from Brookdale been lengthened, but Aunt Fannie, prompted by Uncle Mac’s fondness for his pretty niece, had amused herself by buying several new gowns for her, so that Aunt Sula, whose loving interest had gone into every garment Jacquette had worn since she was a tiny girl, felt an odd pang as she gazed after the smart young woman who started for school, morning after morning, in unfamiliar costumes.

Sula Granville had not married, but her heart was a mother heart, and the love she felt for this child of her only sister was mother love. Ever since she came to Channing, she had been missing Jacquette’s sunny presence about the house, missing the spirit of helpful comradeship which she had grown to depend on in the Brookdale home, but, at the same time, she had realised that Jacquette was breathlessly busy from eight in the morning, when she started for high school, until ten and after, every night, and the more she studied the condition, the more helpless she found herself in coping with it.

“I know how full your time is,” she sympathised, now; “couldn’t you plan to come home right after school, to-day, and do some of the left-overs?”

“Sorority meeting, Tia.”

“I thought that was last Monday.”

“That was a special. This is the regular one, and it’s a matter of loyalty to go. We have to pay a fine if we’re not there. And, to-morrow, Tia, there’ll be rush doings—a spread, you know—that will last till dinner time. And oh, by the way, I want Molly to iron my lace waist so that I can wear it to-morrow. The Kappa Delts are working awfully hard to get this girl we’re after, and it’s understood that we’re to sport up when we give a spread, so the new girls will get the impression that Sigma Pi is the nicest bunch there is.”

“Oh! A girl chooses her sorority by the way its members dress, does she?”

“Tia, that’s teasing! First impressions do count, you know.”

“I see. Well, this begins like a gay week. See what the postman brought, just now. Uncle Mac has sent us tickets for the concert, Wednesday afternoon, because he noticed that the orchestra was going to play some of the Grieg music you worked at so hard, last year. Wasn’t he good?”

A worried frown puckered Jacquette’s forehead. “It was dear of him,” she said. “But we Sigma Pi girls have promised to go up and work in the new sorority rooms after school, Wednesday and Thursday both. There are pillows to make and curtains to hem and no end of things to do.”

“Oh! Well, we can change the tickets to Friday.”

“That won’t do either.” Jacquette looked a little shame-faced as she said it. “Friday afternoon we all have to sew on the new robes we are making for the initiation, and Saturday, the initiation takes all day, you know. So there it is, every afternoon this week taken, and Wednesday night Quis wants to bring a Beta Sig friend of his over here, and then I told the girls I’d make my pillow for the sorority rooms before Saturday. That will take at least two evenings, and you know, Tia, I have to keep a little time for studying!”

The apologetic tone of this last statement was too much for Aunt Sula. “Have to keep time for studying besides doing all that sorority work?” she asked, with an air of gentle surprise.

Jacquette pouted, and then laughed. “You make me think of Mademoiselle! Yesterday, there was an announcement of a basket-ball game on the blackboard, and down at the foot it said, ‘Come, girls, and help us yell!’ She looked at it; then she said, in her sweet, soft voice. ‘Come—girls—and help us—yell! So refined! So suggestive of a lady! Come—girls—and help us—yell!’ Not another word, and wasn’t I glad I hadn’t written it! But that gentle sarcasm belongs to her. It doesn’t to you, Tia.”

“Doesn’t it?” Aunt Sula leaned forward and took her girl’s hands in both of hers. “Then I’ll say it in my own way. Jacquette, I am making up my mind that I’m sorry you joined the sorority.”

“Oh, you mustn’t speak like that to me, Tia! It’s disloyalty to Sigma Pi to listen to it. Say anything you want to about me, but I can’t let you talk against my sorority. There’s Louise!” Jacquette added, brightening suddenly, as the Sigma Pi whistle sounded outside. “I’ll have to go, dearest. Good-bye.” And off she flew.

“Hurry!” Louise called, as Jacquette came down the steps. “Quis was here, but he couldn’t wait. The boys told him there were things doing over at school.”

“What kind of things?” Jacquette asked, half running to keep up.

“Oh, the senior boys are up to something again. You know last week they painted those big, white ‘Naughty-eights’ all over the side-walks and the juniors worked all night, I guess, scrubbing them off with turpentine, and putting ‘Naughty-nines’ in their place. Quis wanted to drop it, then. He’s class president, you know, and wants to keep things dignified, but some of the boys wouldn’t stop, and——”

“Look there!” Jacquette exclaimed, suddenly, as, from two blocks away, both girls beheld a monster Indian in war-paint and feathers, limply hanging by his neck to the flagstaff on the topmost peak of the school building. A placard adorned his chest, bearing, in huge letters, the legend, “’09.”

“That’s what they’ve done! Hanged the junior class in effigy. But how did they ever get it up there?”

As the girls neared the school, a cluster of their Sigma Pi sisters opened almost silently to receive them. Everybody was crowding around Mr. Branch, the principal, to hear what he was saying. Marquis, as class president, had just disavowed all knowledge of the prank.

“That hung there all day yesterday, to amuse people on their way to church,” said Mr. Branch in a tone of annoyance. “It’s a break-neck climb, but the one who put it up knows how to get it down!”

A silence fell.

“Who did it?” he challenged, after a pause, and then a boy who had just come racing down the street, elbowed his way through the crowd, and took off his hat to the principal.

“I did, sir,” he said.

Mr. Branch looked into the frank, sunburned face. “You ought to be past such foolishness, Drake,” he replied, gravely, but the sternness had suddenly gone from his voice. “You’re a senior, this year, remember. I shall expect you to take it down at the noon hour.”

“Who is that boy, Louise?” Jacquette asked, eagerly, as Mr. Branch strode into the building and the pupils went trooping after.

“That’s Bobs Drake, the captain of the football team and idol of the school. Didn’t you notice Mr. Branch when he looked at him? That’s the way with all the teachers. They can’t be cross with Bobs more than a minute at a time.”

“Shouldn’t think they could! He’s splendid. But how is he ever going to bring that Indian down?”

“We’ll see how at noon. I’ll wait for you at this door,” said Louise, as they parted.

Promptly at twelve, the two girls hurried out, just in time to see Bobs Drake throwing off his coat and buttoning his blue sweater close. The ring of boys and girls around him was growing thicker every minute.

“I know where there’s a ladder, Bobs,” some one volunteered.

“No, thank you,” said Bobs, cheerfully, and, without an instant’s hesitation, he began shinning up an oak tree, whose branches grazed the school windows. From a perch in that, he swung himself lightly to an addition which leaned against the main building, and, safely landed there, made a low bow to the admiring crowd now gathered. After that, by the aid of window ledges and cornices, he clambered to the many-gabled roof and began to climb—nimbly, cautiously.

The late October wind crackled with a brittle sound through the yellow-brown leaves of the oaks. It flapped sharply at the girls’ gowns, as they stood there with the cold autumn sunlight shining down on their upturned faces. Suddenly, a gust of it snatched Bobs’s cap from his head, and swept it a block away before the best runners in Marston could capture it, but sure-footed Bobs, undisturbed, stood up on the highest gable, in the midst of an exultant shout from his spectators, and calmly watched the race to the end, before he knelt again, and crept carefully, slowly, along the last ridge-pole, straight to the Indian’s side!

“’Rah for Bobs! Bobs! Bobs! Bobs!” came from below, and then a silence fell while everyone watched to see what he would do next. Before they had seen, it was done. Whipping a ball of heavy twine from his pocket, Bobs had tied one end around the Indian’s neck, had cut the cords which bound him to the flag-staff, and was swiftly lowering him down the front of the building.

With a whoop, seniors and juniors closed upon the helpless dummy, but, in the end, the seniors triumphed, and bore the abject Indian, torn limb from limb, to a vacant field near by, where they promptly set fire to him.

It was a tame cremation, though, with few spectators, for all the girls and most of the boys had lingered to see that Bobs got safely down. Everyone realised that there was actual peril in the feat he had undertaken so gaily, and each danger point passed in the downward climb brought forth a noisier cheering. Once he missed his footing and slipped, the length of his body, down the steep roof. The crowd held its breath, but he stopped himself somehow, and struggled back to safety, amid a tremendous yelling. At last, leaping down to the lowest roof, he caught a branch of the tree, went hand over hand into the boughs, and slid down the trunk to the ground, where he found himself looking straight into the rosy face of a girl with golden hair, who was clapping her hands and shouting “Hurrah!” with the best of them.

Bobs had never seen her until that minute, but, involuntarily, his hand went to his capless head. “Thanks, I’m sure!” he said, with a merry twinkle. Then his admirers closed around him and carried him off to the lunch-room.

“What was that he said to you, Jack?” asked a resentful voice over her shoulder.

“Oh, Quis, are you there? He said ‘Thanks,’ that was all. I don’t know him, you see. Wasn’t it great?”

“Great foolishness, yes! Don’t you know you mustn’t let fellows speak to you until they’ve been introduced?” Marquis answered, in an undertone, and Jacquette, turning away with the girls, felt, suddenly, that the time might come when she should outgrow her cousin’s leading-strings.

The week slipped away, after that, and Saturday came. The Sigma Pi initiation, fixed for that day, was to take place at Nell Brewster’s, but early in the forenoon, two girls came down the street, leading a third, who was blindfolded, and deposited her in the laundry at Jacquette’s home, without a word to anyone. Jacquette had already gone over to Nell’s and presumably had offered the use of her house to the sorority, for, a little later, Miss Granville found another strange girl in the pantry, taking a double handful of cookies out of the jar, and, still later, two more walked into the front door, without greeting of any sort, seated themselves in the living-room, and staid there, silent, for an hour.

Aunt Sula had some difficulty in explaining these “initiation stunts” to her courtly old father, especially after he had tried in vain to make polite conversation with the two girls who had been rendered deaf and dumb by their vow of silence.

“Nothing excuses such rudeness, daughter,” he remonstrated, shaking his silvery head. “I don’t like this sorosis Jacquette is in.”

“Sorority, father,” Miss Granville prompted, with a smile.

“Call it what you will; it’s just as bad,” he persisted. “Those girls are too young to run such a society. They’ve proved it, to-day.”

At ten o’clock that evening, a telephone inquiry brought back from Jacquette the word that the initiation was over, but refreshments were not, and that a crowd of Beta Sigs, Quis among the number, had discovered what was going on, and had broken into Nell’s house, and insisted on being served with some of the goodies. “Oh, we’re having such fun, Tia!” Jacquette concluded. “Don’t sit up for me, you and grandpa. Quis will bring me home, and I’ll come as soon as I possibly can.”

Old Mr. Granville went to rest, then, shaking his head over the change since the good old days in the country when his daughters were young, but Aunt Sula sat in her room and waited. It was after midnight when she finally heard the careful click of the front door latch and the creak of the stairs as a much-subdued girl crept up.

The feasting at Nell’s had lasted a little too long, and had been a little too noisy. Before the party had dispersed, Mr. Brewster, a blunt, outspoken man, had come down to the dining-room, where the boys were pelting each other with cake, and had given them a piece of his mind as to proper hours and fitting behaviour. Most of the girls had cried; the boys had gone home insulted and angry; but, all the time, deep in her heart, Jacquette had felt that Nell’s father had just cause for his action, and now, as she laid off her wraps in her own room, she owned to herself that she was ashamed of the Sigma Pi initiation.

Not since Brookdale had she needed, as she did at that minute, to talk things over with Aunt Sula, and when she saw the light still burning at the end of the hall, she went to the door, and peeped in.

Sula Granville, in a pale blue wrapper, sat before the fire brushing out her long dark hair. She looked extremely girlish in the dim, flickering light, but Jacquette was not thinking of this as she paused in the doorway. Her heart was hungering for the sympathy which had always been hers, at need, from the only mother she had ever known, and she hesitated, now, because of a vague, unhappy feeling that something had come between them. It was a relief, then, when Aunt Sula, looking up, held out her hands without a word, and the next instant found Jacquette on her knees with both arms round the blue wrapper.

Little by little the story of the evening came out, and, when she had heard it all, Aunt Sula said, “Come down here, girlie, with your head on my knee—the old Brookdale way.”

The tired girl slipped to the floor, and a grateful, mothered feeling came to her as she felt a gentle hand smoothing her hair for a minute, before Aunt Sula began:

“You told me once, Jacquette, that every girl who joined Sigma Pi was allowed to except her mother, or guardian, when she took her pledge of secrecy. Do you remember?”

“Y-yes,” came the doubtful answer. “The girls did say so before I joined, but I’ve found out since that they won’t excuse your doing it unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“And the result is, as you said the other day, that no outsider can judge sororities quite fairly, because the best part is secret. Now, I want to judge Sigma Pi fairly. I want you to tell me all the good and beautiful things about it.”

There was a pause, while Jacquette thought this over. Then she offered, tentatively:

“Surely you’ve noticed, Tia, how much more careful I am of my personal appearance? That’s sorority influence.”

“Good, too, unless it leads you to spend more money than you can afford on your wardrobe and to look down on the non-sorority girls who can’t dress so well,” Aunt Sula agreed. “It has occurred to me, though, that when this elaborate attention to dress crowds out time for the care of one’s own bedroom, the sorority hasn’t taught quite daintiness enough.”

Jacquette looked guilty, but she went on, sturdily, “A sorority encourages a spirit of sisterhood, Tia. We have to take vows to love each other always, and help each other, and accept criticism from each other without getting angry.”

“Sisterhood.” The echo was gentle. “What do you think, yourself, Jacquette, of a sisterhood with twenty girls which makes you unsisterly to all girls outside that clique?”

“Well, at least, it trains us to be loyal friends.”

“Perhaps; but if loyalty to Sigma Pi makes you disloyal to duty at home or in school, isn’t there something wrong with it?”

Into Jacquette’s thoughts flashed the memory that two of her Sigma Pi sisters had deliberately missed their afternoon recitations, the week before, because they considered it necessary to take a girl they were “rushing” to the matinee. “But, Tia,” she hurried on, defensively, “you forget its effect on scholarship. We’re ashamed to fall below passing mark, because our pin will be taken off if we do.”

Aunt Sula looked thoughtful. “I wonder if a sorority can help scholarship while it uses up so many study hours?”

“Oh, it does! And then, it’s good social training for us, too.”

“Does it teach you to give the Sigma Pi whistle to a girl a block away, when I’m walking and talking with you on the street?” Aunt Sula put in, quizzically.

“No; but that whistle is the accepted way of hailing each other. All the girls do it; haven’t you noticed? Here’s another good point, though—a sorority interests nice girls in each other instead of their having their heads full of boys. And then—well, isn’t that enough?”

“Not quite. Don’t you think that, as long as your pledges are forced to do things which make them a nuisance to outsiders, you’re giving outsiders reason to think you girls are too young and foolish to have charge of a secret society?”

“You mean our making that girl steal cookies!” Jacquette dimpled, in spite of herself, at the recollection.

“Yes; everything of that sort. And one more thing; I want to know, positively that there is nothing in the Sigma Pi initiation that could offend the delicacy of any sensitive, modest girl.”

Jacquette recalled a certain rite at which one of the pledges had balked in the initiation the day before, and flushed uncomfortably. Just then the bronze clock on the mantel struck one with a silvery note. Aunt Sula looked up, as if answering.

“That’s so,” she said; “it’s too late. An initiation that takes all day ought not to run into the night like this. Jacquette,” she concluded, “I’ll make this bargain with you. I’ll be a friend to Sigma Pi, and never criticise it except as I may suggest something when we are all alone, if you’ll try your best to change these points I’ve spoken of.”

“Oh, Tia!” Jacquette protested, lifting her head. “You forget that I’m one insignificant little freshman. The girls wouldn’t listen to me.”

“One insignificant little freshman with the courage of her convictions can do something. I only ask you to try your best.”

The golden head dropped again, and the little clock ticked away minute after minute while the soft light of the fire wavered over two still figures. At last the tall girl stood up. “I’m going to try,” she said, very gravely. “Give me your hand, Tia. Put your fingers this way. No, this way. There. It would be wrong for me to tell this to anyone else in the world outside of my sorority—and the girls might not understand how it’s right for me to tell even you—but that’s the Sigma Pi grip on our bargain! Good-night, darling.”

CHAPTER IV
BOBS

IT was the noon half-hour at Marston High, and boys and girls were crowding into the little bakery familiarly known among them as the “eat-house.”

Louise Markham and Jacquette had been lucky enough to get a seat at one of the three oilcloth-covered tables, but by far the larger number, with their sandwiches in their hands, were good-naturedly jostling for standing-room.

Jacquette had decided that day, after a few weeks of single-handed effort, to take Louise into her confidence about the bargain with Aunt Sula, and Louise’s hearty response had been an immense relief.

“Your aunt’s exactly right!” she had declared. “She’s gone straight to the weak points of Sigma Pi. Talk about a sorority helping scholarship! The only thing that has saved my scholarship at Marston is the fact that my mother wouldn’t let me go Sigma Pi until I was a junior, and, even since then, it has been hard work to keep sorority business from interfering with my school work. I believe any girl that gets deep in sorority doings the first year of high school will have trouble straightening things out and doing well with her studies the rest of the time, and I want you to tell your Aunt Sula, Jacquette, that I’ll stand by and work for every reform she asked for. I can propose things, being a senior, that the girls wouldn’t take from you, and I believe we can accomplish something.”

“Oh, Louise, you’re such a splendid——” Jacquette began, but Louise nudged her to be quiet. Two boys had slipped into places which had been vacated on the opposite side of the table, and, as Jacquette looked up, she found herself gazing into the blue eyes of Bobs Drake.

Bobs had scarcely seated himself and ordered a glass of milk from the distracted young waitress, who was answering wild calls for “redhots!” and “soup!” from all directions at once, before the boys and girls began to swarm about him.

“I hear you’ve gone into training, now, Bobs, just like a ’varsity man,” began one of the boys. “They’re telling around that you live on birdseed and mush, and take long runs in the early morning. Is that right?”

“He wouldn’t come over to the frat house, last night, anyway,” put in Lawrence Beach. “I understand he’s started going to bed at six, now.”

“Then we’ll have to go around and serenade him,” proposed Rex Morton. “We’ll give him, ‘Oh, does it not seem hard to you?’” He hummed the first line, and the crowd of boys and girls took it up:

“Oh, does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play—

I have to go to bed by day?”

they sang plaintively, while Bobs sat sipping his glass of milk with a good-humoured smile on his sunburned face.

As the joking went on, Jacquette knew, whether she looked at Bobs or not, that his eyes were almost constantly on her. She wondered why. It flattered and embarrassed her at the same time, and she was glad and sorry when Louise proposed to go. A moment later, in brushing past him on her way out, she was astonished to have him slip a folded note into her hand.

“Louise, he’s written something to me!” she exclaimed, as soon as they reached the street. “Let’s see what it says.”

She unfolded the paper and together the two girls read:

“Will you let me walk home with you after school?

“Bobs.”

“Do I know him well enough? Say yes, Louise!” Jacquette demanded. “Blanche Gross introduced him to me the day after that Indian performance and I’ve talked with him in the halls some, since then, but I never dreamed of his giving me a second thought, when he’s so popular, and I’m just a freshman. Blanche says he has the dandiest morals of any boy she knows. What do you think, Louise?”

“Oh, he’s nice. I’ve known him all my life and his mother is one of our best friends, but he’s not a Beta Sig, and Quis isn’t going to like it if you choose friends outside of his frat.”

“H’m! Quis doesn’t own me. Besides, I have to treat all fraternities alike, according to the bargain with Aunt Sula,” Jacquette declared, virtuously, and immediately began to compose her reply to Bobs.

That reply consumed a large part of the study-hour following. The momentous questions involved were: first, how to begin; second, what to say; third, how to end.

If Bobs were any other boy, it would be right to call him “Mr.,” but no one in the school said “Mr. Drake.” Everyone said “Bobs.” His real name was Robin Sidney Drake, but that was absurd for Bobs! Besides, he had signed himself “Bobs.”

Meantime a procession of Aunt Sula’s admonitions in regard to writing notes to boys haunted Jacquette like ghosts, and made her tear up effort after effort. When the last was finally completed it read as follows: