“And I like Philip Lampey,” said Jeannette. “I don’t know him very well,
but he always has such excellent manners and he does get his lessons.
Don’t you think he’s awfully fine?”
[Sidenote: Helping a Comrade]
Miss Parsons and Jeannette White were discussing the high school seniors
in a very friendly and personal way. When Philip Lampey was mentioned
the teacher’s brow clouded.
“I’m beginning to be worried about Philip, Jeannette,” she said. “He’s
being taken up by that fast set, and he seems to like it. He’s losing
his frank way, and beginning to swagger just a little, and to be oily
instead of just courteous. I don’t think he’s very far gone. Now, he
likes you; can’t you help us out, and save Philip from going over to
that cigarette-smoking, idle crowd?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll talk it over with mother,” Jeannette promised.
“I don’t think I have very much influence, however.”
A few days later Jeannette called to Philip as they were passing to
geometry, “Oh, Philip, mother is giving me a birthday party on the 22nd
and I want you to go over the senior class with me and help me make out
the guest-list, and perhaps you have some ideas about things to do too.
Can we do it after physics this afternoon?”
“We sure can,” Philip assented, much delighted to find himself social
arbiter. “I’ll be at your desk at 4:05.”
So Philip came to Jeannette’s desk, and they began on the list.
“There’s Sam Blennerman, he’s a good fellow. You’ll want him,” he
suggested, as they came to one of his new chums.
“That stuffy little snob? I should say not!” Jeannette lifted her nose
in great scorn. “The other day I heard him making fun of Earl Stubbs
because he stayed out to go to church in Lent. I think he’s
insufferable!”
“Do you? Oh, he’s not so bad when you know him, though. Well, how about
Vernon East?”
“He smells like a tobacco shop. I never saw him without one of those
nasty little rolls of his in evidence. Father would want to know what I
was coming to.”
“Sylvia Fanslow, Mark Gorham, Francis Hingham—I suppose they all go on?”
Philip held a tentative pencil in air.
“Yes. And Emil Irwin. Leave out Leonard James, of course.”
“But why? His family’s awfully good, and he’s no end of fun. Keeps
things in a roar, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I know his kind of a roar—he thinks he’s such a man of the
world. But isn’t he the boy Mr. Burcher almost expelled for swearing on
the campus?”
“Well, yes, he is. But you wouldn’t expect him to swear at your party
you know.”
“Naturally not. But I haven’t any use for a boy who has one set of words
for girls and another for boys. That’s a double standard and mother says
double standards of any kind are bad.”
Philip was suffering a revision of his ideals at the hands of this girl.
In the evenings he spent at her house, planning the party, he came to
revise them further still as a result of the tactful suggestion of
Jeannette’s mother. When the party was over, he found his taste for the
“fast crowd” had disappeared. To keep Jeannette’s good opinion he would
have pretended to believe anything, but so pliable is youth before habit
has fixed one’s attitudes, that he had really come to believe in the
same high standards that Jeannette held.