as and stage-coach parties to the football games.
The young men naturally wished to be invited to these functions,
the increasing elaborateness of which kept pace with the increasing
sophistication of life in La Chance and the increasing cost of which
made the parents of the girls groan. Consequently each masculine
fraternity took care that it did not incur the enmity of the organized
and socially powerful sororities. But Sylvia was not protected by this
aegis. She was not invited during her Freshman year to the dances
given by either the sororities or the fraternities; and the large
scattering crowd of masculine undergraduates were frightened away from
the handsome girl by her supposed haughty intellectual tastes.

Here again her isolation was partly the result of her own wish. The
raw-boned, badly dressed farmers' lads, with red hands and rough hair,
she quite as snobbishly ignored as she was ignored in her turn by the
well-set-up, fashionably dressed young swells of the University, with
their white hands, with their thin, gaudy socks tautly pulled over
their ankle-bones, and their shining hair glistening like lacquer on
their skulls (that being the desideratum in youthful masculine society
of the place and time). Sylvia snubbed the masculine jays of college
partly because it was a breath of life to her battered vanity to be
able to snub some one, and partly because they seemed to her, in
comparison with the smart set, seen from afar, quite and utterly
undesirable. She would rather have no masculine attentions at all than
such poor provender for her feminine desire to conquer.

Thus she trod the leafy walks of the beautiful campus alone, ignoring
and ignored, keenly alive under her shell of indifference to the
brilliant young men and their chosen few feminine companions.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. DRAPER BLOWS THE COALS

The most brilliant of these couples were Jermain Fiske, Jr.,
and Eleanor Hubert. The first was the son of the well-known and
distinguished Colonel Jermain Fiske, one of the trustees of the
University, ex-Senator from the State. He belonged to the old,
free-handed, speech-making type of American statesmen, and, with his
florid good looks, his great stature, his loud, resonant, challenging
voice, and his picturesque reputation for highly successful
double-dealing, he was one of the most talked-of men in the State,
despite his advanced years. His enemies, who were not few, said that
the shrewdest ac