The junior class election taught Julia Peyton one unflattering truth. She was far from popular enough to win a nomination to the class presidency. Augusta Forbes directed her efforts, heart and soul toward the nomination of Doris Monroe. Doris as zealously rooted for Calista Wilmot, who had come to be greatly liked among the Hamilton students. Calista won the nomination by a majority of five votes and was subsequently elected president.
Notwithstanding the fact that Julia Peyton had not “a look in” at the presidency she was not without sympathetic support so far as a number of the juniors at Wayland Hall were concerned. These had been the sophs of the previous year of whom Leila Harper had signally disapproved. Then she had rated the Hall as a house divided against itself. With the opening again of the college she had not changed her opinion.
Counting Leslie Cairns she could number only fourteen staunch democrats at the Hall. There were now eight freshmen at the Hall whose politics were yet unannounced. Of the twenty-three other residents 148there was but one on whom she could rely as a neutral. This was Miss Duncan, a tall girl with a ministerial air who had succeeded in passing the set of “Brooke Hamilton Perfect Examination Papers” and had been awarded the special room at Wayland Hall set aside for this purpose. It had been vacant since Katherine Langly had attained that honor.
Hardly had the stir attending the junior election died away when Julia Peyton began agitating the subject of the select social sorority which she had been impatiently waiting to organize. She and Clara had privately decided that it should be called the “Orchid” Club—the name typifying, in her opinion, the select and exclusive.
Mildred Ferguson, the freshman in 17 of whom Julia had glowingly spoken to Clara, had hailed the idea of the club with flattering enthusiasm. She was a small, slim girl with a pair of laughing blue eyes, a bright brown bob and a bold boyish face. She drove her own car, wore clothes of distinctive smartness and regarded everything in the way of luxury as having been produced for her benefit. She had had everything she fancied from babyhood. In consequence she never paused to consider anyone except herself. She was not interested in college except as a necessary bridge which had to be crossed into Society.
She soon found the poise of the post graduates at Wayland Hall not to her taste. The Bertram girls 149bored her, and she stood in secret awe of Doris Monroe and Leslie Cairns. Miss Duncan she dubbed the Eternal Dig. She found the more artificial standards of Julia Peyton, Clara Carter and their junior supporters more to her liking. She enjoyed having a “stand-in” with the juniors at the Hall and professed animated interest in the organizing of the Orchid Club. At heart she was so thoroughly snobbish as to agree with Julia’s sentiments in regard to it.
Due to one delay or another, it was the early part of November before the Orchid Club, consisting of twenty-six members, held its first meeting in the living room of the Hall, Julia having haughtily requested the use of it from Miss Remson beforehand. To her deep satisfaction Julia was elected president of the club. Mildred Ferguson, however, won the vice-presidency, and with it Clara Carter’s undying resentment.
There were no other offices to be filled. The Orchid Club was to be of a purely social nature, with no need of a secretary or treasurer. There was to be a dinner or luncheon twice each week at the expense of one or another of the club members, and a monthly meeting in the living room of the Hall.
“The Screech Owl has gone into local politics and is now a president,” Muriel breezily informed Leslie Cairns and Doris Monroe as she entered Doris’s and her room late one November afternoon to find the two deep in a discussion of psycho-analysis.
150Leslie had taken up psychology and political science, the two subjects she had had on her senior program at the time of her expulsion from Hamilton. Thus far, since her return to Hamilton, she had wondered at the lack of unpleasant stir which had marked her reappearance on the campus as a student. It seemed that she might, after all, be fated to escape the harsh criticism which she felt would be justly her due. She had been agreeably disappointed in that Julia Peyton had not, to her knowledge, brought up against her as a matter of gossip the eventful night of the Rustic Romp.
“Julia Peyton a president?” Doris Monroe turned her blue-green eyes amusedly upon Muriel. “Of what, may I ask?”
“Of the Orchid Club. Isn’t that a select name. It suggests luxury, doesn’t it? Something like the Sans—I beg your pardon, Leslie.” Muriel checked herself, looking comically contrite. “I never think of you now as a San,” she went on in further apology.
“Don’t mind me,” Leslie waved off the apology. “You are exactly right in what you just said,” she continued half grimly. “I have been keeping a wary eye upon Miss Peyton and Miss Carter since I came to the Hall. I fully expected they might start trouble for me. I am amazed to think they haven’t. Leila is right, too, in saying the Hall is a house divided against itself. It’s not our side of it, though, that has put down a dividing line. By ‘our side’ I 151mean the Travelers, the Bertram gir............