"Yes," put in Mary, "and we'll make them all give us extra orders."
"We will save out a dollar for you to live on till March," said Betty.
"Oh no, I shall borrow of you," retorted Mary, and then they all laughed and felt better.
On St. Valentine's morning Betty posted a registered valentine. The verse read:--
"There are three of us and three of you, Though only one knows one, So pray accept this little gift And go and have some fun."
But if the rhyme went haltingly and was not quite true either, as Betty pointed out, since Adelaide and Alice had contributed to the fund, and the whole house had bought absurd quantities of valentines because it was such a "worthy object" ("just as if I wasn't a worthy object!" sighed Mary), there was nothing the matter with the "little gift," which consisted of three crisp ten dollar bills.
"Oh, if they should feel hurt!" thought Betty anxiously, and dodged Emily Davis so successfully that until the day of the rally they did not meet.
That week was a tremendously exciting one. To begin with, on the twentieth the members of both the freshman basket-ball teams were announced. Rachel was a "home" on the regular team, and Katherine a guard on the "sub," so the Chapin house fairly bubbled over with pride and pleasure in its double honors. Then on the morning of the twenty-second came the rally with its tumultuous display of class and college loyalty, its songs written especially for the occasion, its shrieks of triumph or derision (which no intrusive reporter should make bold to interpret or describe as "class yells," since such masculine modes of expression are unknown at Harding), and its mock-heroic debate on the vital issue, "Did or did not George Washington cut down that cherry-tree?"
Every speaker was clever and amusing, but Emily Davis easily scored the hit of the morning. For whereas most freshmen are frightened and appear to disadvantage on such an occasion, she was perfectly calm and self-possessed, and made her points with exactly the same irresistible gaucherie and daring infusion of local color that had distinguished her performance at the class meeting. Besides, she was a "dark horse"; she did not belong to the leading set in her class, nor to any other set, for that matter, and this fact, together with the novel method of her election made her interesting to her essentially democratic audience. So when the judges--five popular members of the faculty--announced their decision in favor of the negative, otherwise the junior-freshman side of the debate, 19--'s enthusiasm knew no bounds, and led by the delighted B's they carried their speaker twice round the gym on their shoulders--which is an honor likely to be remembered by its recipient for more reasons than one.