Betty, hurrying up. "And girls, please don't say
anything about it, but non-graduates don't generally come to the suppers
and the seating committee forgot about T. Reed, so she hasn't any
place."

"The idea!" cried Bob indignantly. "But she can have Eleanor's seat."

Betty hesitated. "No, because they changed the chart after they heard
about Christy's not coming. But Cora Thorne is sick, so I'm going to let
T. have my seat, right among you girls that she used to know----"

"You're not going to do anything of the kind," declared Babbie hotly.
"Shove everybody along one place, or else put in a seat for T."

"The chairs are too close together now and Cora's place is way around at
the other end. It would make too much confusion to move so many people.
Here comes T. now. I shall be almost opposite Eleanor and Katherine, and
I don't mind one bit."

So it happened that Betty Wales ate her class supper between Clara
Madison and the fat Miss Austin, and enjoyed it as thoroughly as if she
had been where she belonged, between Babbie and Roberta. The supper
wasn't very good--suppers for two hundred and fifty people seldom
are--but the talk and the jokes, the toasts and the histories, Eleanor's
radiant face at the head of the table, the spirit of jollity and
good-fellowship everywhere,--these were good enough to make up. Besides,
it was the last time they would all be together. Betty hadn't realized
before how much she cared for them all--for the big indiscriminate mass
of the class that she had worked and played with these four years. She
had expected to miss her best friends, but now, as she looked down the
long tables, she saw so many others that she should miss. Yes, she
should miss them all from the fat Miss Austin who was so delighted to be
sitting beside her to the serious-minded Carlotta Young, with her
theories about testing your education.

Katherine was reading the freshman history, hitting off the reception,
with its bewildering gaiety and its terrifying grind-book, those first
horrible midyears, made even more frightful by Mary Brooks's rumor, the
basket-ball game--when that was mentioned they made T. Reed stand on her
chair to be cheered, and then they cheered the rest of the team, who, as
Katherine said, "had marched so gallantly to a glorious defeat." As
Christy wasn't there, somebody read her letter, which explained that her
mother was better but that the twins had come down with the measles and
Christy was "s