COMPROMISE
When Jacquette came down to breakfast the next morning, looking pale in
spite of her fresh pink and white gown, her grandfather stood at the
foot of the stairs waiting, and, as she paused on the last step, he put
both hands on her shoulders, and kissed her.
Not a word was said about the missing Sigma Pi pin, but Jacquette,
glancing past him, saw the tremulous smile on Aunt Sula’s face, and
knew that both these dearest people on earth understood how hard it had
been for her to make the decision of the night before, and were keeping
back the expression of their own gladness, for her sake. It touched her
deeply to realise how much the gentle old man had really cared, during
all the months when he had kept so silent, and the answering hug she
gave him spoke her feeling as plainly as words.
After that they went to the table and chatted about the graduating
exercises, Bobs’s prophecy, and Louise’s honours as lightly as if no
such thing as resignation from a sorority had ever been thought of,
until, just as they were rising from breakfast, Aunt Sula happened to
say,
“Of course Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Fanny were disappointed that Quis
didn’t take the scholarship, but it must have been easier for them to
see Louise carry it off than anyone else. She’s such a pet with them,
they couldn’t help being glad.”
Then Jacquette’s grandfather, slipping one arm around his little,
dark-haired daughter, and the other around the tall girl he called
“Goldilocks,” said slowly,
“I suppose the Markhams think they’re the proudest, happiest family in
town this morning--but they’re not.”
He was looking into Jacquette’s eyes as he spoke, and, in spite of a
choking sensation in her throat, she smiled back at him bravely while
she squeezed Aunt Sula’s hand. It was a comfort to feel that they all
understood without words.
Before the morning was over, Jacquette slipped away for a talk with
Louise, and when she came back, she went straight to Aunt Sula’s room.
“Tia,” she said, “don’t think I’m weakening, but Louise advises me not
to take off my pin yet and not to say a word to any of the girls until
they all come together again at the beginning of the fall term. There
won’t be any sorority doings in vacation, anyway, and some of the girls
have gone away for the summer already, and several more start to-day,
and she says if I should tell the few that are left, they would begin
to write letters to the others giving their versions of the matter,
and my reasons wouldn’t be half as well understood as if I went to the
first sorority meeting of the year myself, and explained it to them all
at the same time.”
“That sounds sensible; perhaps she’s right,” Aunt Sula agreed. “How
does she feel about what you’re going to do?”
“Oh, she’s the same trump as ever. At first she felt that I couldn’t
do it--that I wouldn’t be able to stand the way the girls would act,
but after that, she praised me until I felt foolish. But still----”
Jacquette stopped as if sorry she had begun the sentence.
“Well?”
“She says, Tia, that if she were going to be here in high school
another year, she’s afraid she couldn’t follow my lead. It would be
more than she could bear to have all the Sigma Pi girls turn against
her.”
There was a silence before Aunt Sula answered, “Never think, dear,
that I don’t appreciate how hard it is.”
“And don’t you ever think I’m going back on it,” Jacquette cried,
brushing away a few tears that had come in spite of her. “Will you
explain to Grandpa why I put this on again? I--I’d rather not have
to speak about it.” She walked to the mantel where the Sigma Pi pin
had lain all night. “Tell him I’m just going to wear it until school
begins. Louise says it would start questioning if I happened to meet
any of the girls without having it on, and she thinks it will be so
much better to tell them all together, myself.”
“Yes, I’ll tell him,” Aunt Sula promised, watching Jacquette’s tender
glance at the little pin. “Does it really mean so much more to you than
any other piece of jewellery?”
“Oh, it does! It stands for so many things--all my Marston good
times--all my friendships with the girls. Why, anybody else but you
would think it was perfectly foolish if I should tell how it makes me
feel to think of leaving off that pin. But there!--we’re not going to
talk about it all summer. Where’s that dimity you said I could make
into a waist? If I’m going to be an accomplished dressmaker before
vacation’s over, I mustn’t lose any time.”
So she plunged into the summer, determined not to make her sacrifice
unlovely, and she succeeded, through all the busy weeks that followed.
In July there was a visit to Brookdale, and after that, by her sweetest
wiles, she coaxed her stay-at-home grandfather into a bracing trip on
the lakes with Aunt Sula and herself, and brought him home feeling
years younger and happier.
Then came a series of farewell boat-rides and picnics in the park, with
Louise and Marquis and Bobs, for the two boys had honestly buried the
high-school hatchet on the night of their graduation, and they and
Louise were bent on making the most of these last days with Jacquette
before starting away for their first year of college work. There was
no end to the frolics they planned and carried out, until suddenly, in
the midst of all the hurry and fun, came the opening day of school at
Marston High.
Except Louise, Marquis and Bobs were the only ones outside of home who
had been told Jacquette’s intention in regard to her sorority. Bobs had
received the news very quietly. “It’ll take sand,” was his one comment,
“and you have it.”
But telling Marquis had been another matter.
“It’s a quixotic attitude, imported from Brookdale, and you’ll find
it doesn’t belong in Channing,” he had declared. “Aunt Sula and
grandfather mean all right, I know, but their ideas are old-fashioned
about some things and nobody will get your point of view, at all.
Everybody at Marston will set you down as funny. I’m going to have
mother go over and talk to Aunt Sula.”
The next day Aunt Fanny had come, and had said a great deal in her own
forceful way about the pity of making Jacquette a social outcast for
the remaining three years of her high-school life, especially after
Marquis had interested himself so much to get her nicely started with
the right girls. It was only the course of nature, she maintained,
that, in a public school where all classes were thrown together, the
carefully brought-up girls should band together, and be separated from
the rabble.
Sula Granville’s answer had been that, though she was glad of
Jacquette’s decision, she had never urged it, and, true to the spirit
of this, she told her every word that Aunt Fanny had said. Apparently,
there was no result, but the warnings found a sensitive spot, none the
less, and they were all surging through Jacquette’s mind when she stood
up at the first sorority meeting of the year, and faced her Sigma Pi
sisters.
It was a sparse little gathering, compared with the last one of the
spring before. Some of the girls had moved during the summer; others
had been graduated; still others had broken off their course at Marston
to go away to a finishing school. The Sigma Pi ranks would soon be
filled by new girls--in fact there were five or six being rushed, even
now--but, to-day, there were less than a dozen at the meeting.
For a minute Jacquette’s words refused to come. She remembered Bobs’s
faith: “It’ll take sand--and you have it.” At the same instant, she
met the loving eyes of Louise, sitting there in all the dignity of an
alumna, among the other girls. She knew very well why Louise had taken
time, in the hurry of preparation for her year away from home, to come
to that meeting, and the knowledge helped. Then she thought of Tia, and
began.
It was a simple, straightforward story, told with evident effort, and
listened to in breathless silence by the girls. As Jacquette went on,
a blank dismay grew on all the faces, but to her relief there was
not a trace of the unfriendly resentment and bitterness that she had
dreaded. It dawned upon her, while she stood there speaking, that a
very different feeling had grown up between herself and the girls since
the quarrel of almost a year before, and the thought added a new hurt
to the step she was taking, but it did not make her falter.
She told them frankly how the first half of her freshman year had been
so filled to overflowing with sorority business and sorority fun that
her studies had been a farce; how she had often been actually crowded
into the necessity of preparing one lesson during the recitation of
another. She reminded them of her failure to pass for the month in
two studies, just before the semi-finals, and of her determination,
after that, to show everybody that she could be a sorority girl and a
student, too, an undertaking which had proved too much for her physical
strength.
“But it isn’t only on account of scholarship and health that I’m saying
this,” she finished, honestly. “The truth is, girls, while I love you
all as much as ever, I can’t help knowing that I do owe something to my
home and the people in it. Last year, it was just a place to rush into
for eating and sleeping. My interests were all somewhere else. Another
thing: I haven’t a rich father, the way most of you have. I haven’t
any father living. There is a certain sum of money set aside for my
education, but it isn’t large, and the proportion of it that went into
my first year at Marston was so much more than it had any right to be
that the one reason of expense is enough to make me feel that I ought
to give up being a Sigma Pi.”
Jacquette felt her knees begin to shake as she reached this period, and
she sat down rather abruptly. For a minute no one made a sound.
Then Mamie Coolie, leaning forward, asked in a horrified tone,
“Jacquette, you can’t mean you’re going to make us expel you?”
Jacquette’s face quivered, but she managed to answer steadily, “I
suppose it’s the only way.”
“Oh!” “How dreadful!” “But we _can’t_ expel Jacquette.” “Tell her she’s
wild to think of it.” “Talk her out of it, Louise,” were the whispers
that flew round the room. Flo Burton sprang to her feet to protest, but
she sat down again, sobbing, and then handkerchief after handkerchief
went up as the girls saw that there were tears in Jacquette’s own eyes.
Etta Brainerd, who was presiding, still sat in dumb amazement, trying
to grasp the full significance of the thing, when Louise Markham’s
voice caught the attention of everybody.
“I just want to remind you, girls,” she was saying, quietly, “that
inactive membership excuses a member from all duties connected with the
sorority. She isn’t required to help in the rushing, to go to spreads
or initiations, in fact to do anything. She doesn’t have to pay dues.
She simply wears her pin and is just as much one of us as ever in her
spirit toward us and ours toward her. She’s allowed to know sorority
secrets and she gets bids to the dances and all that, just like an
alumna, and the best of it all is that no one outside of the sorority
has to be any the wiser. There’s not a thing about inactive membership
that could possibly interfere with one’s scholarship, or one’s health,
or one’s pocket-book, and if the time comes when circumstances permit
the inactive member to become active again, all she has to do is to say
so. Of course I don’t want to dictate, when I’m not going to be here
myself, but I just offer these remarks as a suggestion.”
“That’s the thing!” Flo Burton exclaimed, as Louise took her seat.
“That’s what we’ll do!” “Make her inactive for a year.” “You needn’t do
a bit of work, Jacquette, but we can’t spare you and we just _couldn’t_
disgrace you before the whole school. We love you too much.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you spoke of that, Louise!” cried all the girls
together, throwing the order of the meeting to the winds as they
crowded about the chair where Jacquette sat, her face flooded with
sudden gladness.
Louise had not given her an inkling of what she meant to do, and
Jacquette had never thought of hoping that the girls might cling to
her, regardless of her active usefulness to the sorority. The whole
spirit of the meeting was so different from the thing which she had
braced herself to endure that it swept her along, unresisting, and it
began to seem as if she had created, in her own imagination, a bogy
which never existed. What harm could there be in simply keeping the
friendship of the girls?
“Oh, Louise,” she whispered, eagerly, catching the hand of her closest
friend, “do you think it’s all right? Would Tia be just as well
pleased?”
“Don’t see why not,” was the sturdy answer. “It gives you back all
your time for study and home things, and just prevents your losing the
friendship of the girls you like best. I think she’ll be glad, or I
shouldn’t have proposed it.”
[Illustration: _As they crowded about Jacquette, her face flooded with
sudden gladness_]
So it was settled, and when Jacquette, still wearing her pin, walked
home with a body-guard of devoted Sigma Pi girls following to the door,
it seemed as if a great cloud had rolled out of her sky. Inactive
membership would have seemed impossible before the moment when she had
made up her mind to endure actual expulsion, but now, with its promise
of comparative secrecy, its assurance of continued friendship from the
girls, and its possibility of a return to activity sometime in the
future, it glittered like a beautiful reward of virtue.
She was so sure of having done the right thing, that it was hard to
be patient and explain, when Aunt Sula and her grandfather seemed
doubtful, but she succeeded, and, when she finally went upstairs alone,
she smiled at a happy Jacquette in the mirror, resolving that Tia
should see, from day to day, how truly inactive membership would give
all the benefits and none of the drawbacks of the uncompromising other
plan.
Jacquette was early at school the next morning, and Mademoiselle gave
her an approving nod. Then she asked her to help two new pupils in
making out their programme.
It happened that they were both girls who had been singled out the
day before as possible members of Sigma Pi, and, though Jacquette
fully intended to keep out of the rushing, she was glad of an innocent
chance to lend a hand, and proceeded to make herself as attractive as
possible. While doing so, she took such a fancy to the younger of the
two, a shy little brown-eyed girl named Mary Elliott, that at noon she
found herself watching for them to come out of their class so that she
might take them under her wing and show them the best kind of sandwich
to buy at the “eat-house.”
As the three went out of the school building together, they met a group
of Jacquette’s Sigma Pi sisters, with two more new girls, and all fell
in together.
“Isn’t that a Sigma Pi Epsilon pin you have on?” Mary Elliott asked of
Jacquette, who nodded with an odd little ripple of gladness over her
face.
“Marion, that settles it for me?” said Mary to the other girl.
“Settles what?” Jacquette inquired.
“Oh, nothing; only two sororities have asked us to their spreads this
afternoon, and I want to go to the Sigma Pi Epsilon one, if that’s what
you belong to.”
“Well, I should say! So do I,” Marion Crandall chimed in promptly, with
a bold, black-eyed glance at Jacquette, which, though it was meant to
be flattering, did not altogether please her.
“Do all the girls that go to this school belong to sororities?” Mary
Elliott asked Jacquette in a timid undertone.
“Mercy, no!”
The innocent question brought a smile to Jacquette’s face.
“All the nicest ones, then?”
“Well, a nice girl that didn’t make a sorority would have a pretty
lonesome time at Marston,” Jacquette was admitting, when Blanche Gross
suddenly whirled around and offered them hot roasted peanuts from the
bag she carried.
“Jack, do you know about these four Marys?” she asked, laughingly. “You
have two with you, and I have two more here. Let me make you acquainted
with Mary Barnes from St. Paul and Marie Stanwood from Omaha.”
“And here’s Marion Crandall and Mary Elliott,” Jacquette responded.
“Isn’t that the funniest thing? They must be the ‘Queen’s Maries’.”
“Oh, do you know that song?” said Mary Elliott. “My mother used to sing
me to sleep with it.”
“Pretty sad going to sleep, wasn’t it?” Jacquette asked, with a smile,
and hummed a little of the haunting old melody:
“‘Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she’ll hae but three.
. . . . .
Oh, little did my mother ken,
The death I was to dee!’”
“You left out,
“‘There was Mary Seaton, and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael, and me.’
And oh, girls!--we _are_ Mary B, and Mary S. and Mary C. and me. I must
be ‘me’--M. E.--Mary Elliott.”
“Sure enough!” Jacquette answered, gaily. “Now, all you girls have to
do is to fly around and catch your Queen.”
But, while the rest laughed, Mary Elliott surprised her by nestling
closer as they passed into the restaurant, and whispering, with an
adoring upward glance, “I’ve caught _my_ Queen, now.”
This was how it happened that Jacquette began to be called the
“Queen”--a nickname that clung to her from that day; and, in spite of
the fact that she was never seen at spreads, and that she was even
absent from the triumphant initiation, a few weeks later, when the
“four Maries” were all taken into Sigma Pi at once, the new girls
understood that she was identified with the sorority they were joining,
and, for some reason--perhaps in the start a fanciful idea of being
the “Queen’s Maries”--they insisted on choosing her as their sorority
“mother.”
It was she who furnished them with the thousand and one little hints on
high-school dress and manners which were part of the Sigma Pi education
of new members, and, in return, all the Maries, with the exception
perhaps of Marion Crandall, whose effusive manner never seemed quite
real to Jacquette, gave their Queen the confidence of devoted subjects.
But, of the four, it was Mary Elliott who came closest. After a little,
she fell into the habit of bringing her books, day after day, and
studying at the “Palace,” as the Queen’s modest home was immediately
dubbed, and both Mr. Granville and his daughter found themselves
growing very fond of the gentle girl, at first because of the love in
her eyes whenever she looked at Jacquette, but soon because of her own
dear, quiet little self.