not, then her best
friend had, and they talked it over together, told what Christy had
suggested about the tables for class-supper, how Kate was having all her
own dresses made for Portia and Nerissa couldn't afford to, so Eleanor
Watson had lent her a beautiful blue satin, or what the new Ivy Day
committees had decided about the exercises. There was no longer a
monopoly of anything in 19--. Incidentally, as Katherine pointed out,
nobody was resting her nerves at the infirmary.

Betty would have been perfectly happy if she hadn't felt obliged to
worry a little about Georgia Ames. Ashley Dwight had been up to see her
twice since the prom. Betty felt responsible for their friendship and
wondered if she ought to warn Tom that she really didn't know anything
about Georgia. For suppose Georgia hadn't had anything to do with the
Westcott house robbery; that didn't prove anything about her having
taken Nita's pin in the fall.

If Madeline had spoken to her protegee, as she intended to do, about
excluding the Blunderbuss from her acquaintance, Georgia had paid the
advice scant heed. The Blunderbuss came to see her more and more often
as the term went on. To be sure Georgia was very seldom at home when the
senior called. Indeed her roommate was getting to feel decidedly injured
because Georgia never used her room except to sleep and dress in.

CHAPTER XVI

A HOOP-ROLLING AND A TRAGEDY

19-- was having its hoop-rolling. This is the way a senior hoop-rolling
is managed: custom decrees that it may take place on any afternoon of
senior week, which is the week before commencement when the seniors'
work is over though the rest of the classes are still toiling over their
June exams. Some morning a senior who feels particularly young and
frolicsome suggests to her friends at chapel that, as the time-honored
official notice puts it,

"The day has come, the seniors said,
To have our little fling.
Let's buy our hoops and roll them round,
And laugh and dance and sing."

If her friends also feel frolicsome they pass the word along, and unless
some last year's girls have bequeathed them hoops, they hurry down-town
to buy them of the Harding dealer who always keeps a stock on hand for
these annual emergencies. The seniors dress for luncheon in "little
girl" fashion, skirts up and hair down, and the minute the meal is over
they rush out into the sunshine to roll hoop, skip rope, swing in the
long-suffering