Betty turned obediently toward home, feeling very small
and useless and unhappy. Jean's announcement had been so sudden and so
amazing that she didn't know what she had said in response to it, and
she was quite sure that she hadn't done at all what Jean expected. Then
this confirmation of her suspicions about Jean gave her an uneasy
feeling about Georgia. That baffling young person was just leaving the
gym as Betty got back to it, and the sight of her surrounded by a bevy
of her admiring friends reassured Betty wonderfully. Nevertheless she
decided to go and see Miss Ferris. There was something she wanted to ask
about.

After half an hour spent in Miss Ferris's cozy sitting-room, she started
out to find Barbara, armed with the serene conviction that everything
would come out right in the end.

"How do people influence other people?" she had demanded early in her
call. "There is some one I want to influence, if I could, but I don't
know how to begin."

"That's a big question, Betty," Miss Ferris assured her smilingly. "In
general I think the best way to influence people is to be ourselves the
things we want them to be--honest and true and kind."

Betty mused on this advice as she crossed the campus. "That was a good
deal what Jean said. I guess I must just attend to my own affairs and
wait and let things happen, the way Madeline does. This about Jean just
happened."

She passed Georgia's door on her way up-stairs. The room was full of
girls, listening admiringly to their hostess's reminiscences of the
afternoon. "That sophomore guard was so rattled. She kept saying, 'I
will, I will, I will,' between her teeth and she was so busy saying it
that she forgot to go for the ball. But she didn't forget to stick her
elbow into me between times--not she. I wanted to slug her a little just
for fun, but of course I wouldn't. I perfectly hate people who don't
play fair."

Betty went on up the stairs smiling happily. She wanted to hug Georgia
for that last sentence.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOONSHINERS' BACON-ROAST

Jean's sudden retirement from the cast of "The Merchant of Venice" was
the subject of a good deal of excited conjecture during the few days
that remained of the winter term. Betty explained it briefly to Barbara,
who in turn confided Jean's story to the rest of her committee. All of
them but Clara Ellis thought better of Jean than they ever had before
for the courage she had shown in owning herself in the wro