Betty Wales decides

“Goodness! I’m glad I elected this sociology course.” Fluffy Dutton precipitated herself through the half-open door of Timmy Wentworth’s big corner double (universally called Timmy’s room, though half of it, of course, belonged to Sallie Wright), tossed her note-book on the table, dexterously extracted two fat cushions from behind Eugenia Ford’s head, and as dexterously inserted them and herself on Sallie’s couch, in a practically invisible vacancy between Straight and Montana Marie O’Toole. There were plenty of other seats to choose from, but Fluffy was intent on securing a central position as regards both the conversation and the refreshments which her keen eyes had detected in Susanna Hart’s lap.

There were loud remonstrances from Eugenia and Straight, amused giggles from Montana Marie, and then, because it was a hot, unprofitable May day, with “absolutely nothing doing,” as Straight had just remarked, objections to Fluffy’s high-handed conduct subsided in favor of an interest in Fluffy’s sudden and amazing fondness for sociology.

“But you’ve said right along that you hated it because it came in the afternoon,” Eugenia reminded her.

“And because of all the reference reading,” added Straight.

“And the awful way Miss Seaton does her hair,” put in Montana Marie, with another giggle.

“Frivolous objections, all of them.” Fluffy reached a long arm for the candy. “Miss Seaton is a fright, and the library ought to buy more books and save us the nerve-racking scramble for them. And it’s a burning shame to put a course as important as this one at such an absurd hour. But just the same”—Fluffy’s manner took on the patronizing air of the over-indulged, because soon-departing senior—“just the same I advise all you juniors and sophs, and you, Montana Marie, if you ever should get to be a senior, to elect sociology and find out a few things about this woman question.”

“This woman question!” repeated Susanna Hart scornfully. “Do you mean equal suffrage and all sorts of other boring subjects like that?”

Fluffy waited to finish a large mouthful. “Suffrage isn’t a bore. It’s a matter that every intelligent woman ought to think about at least.”

“Don’t quote Celissa Seaton, Fluffy,” Straight told her severely. “Her style of oratory doesn’t suit you at all. No matter how long you live, nor how frightfully you get to doing up your back hair, you’ll never pass for the intellectual woman type, I’m happy to say.”

“There you are again!” objected Fluffy eagerly. “Mixing up pretty clothes and a talent for making smooth and becoming puffs with baby-doll brains. Intelligent women nowadays aren’t dowds, Straight.”

“Some are. Example, Miss Celissa Seaton,” retorted Straight promptly.

“Go it, twins.” Montana Marie passed the candy to the combatants impartially, but Fluffy refused it and sat up with dignity against her stolen cushions.

“Honestly, girls, I’m serious about this sociology. When you’re almost through college, you look back over the work you’ve had, and wish you could remember more about it, and are pretty sure that you’ll remember a lot less before long, and anyway that a lot of it hasn’t much to do with real life. Greek prose, for instance, and trig. and—syllogisms.”

“I certainly hope I shan’t encounter any syllogisms in real life,” put in Straight fervently. “Because if I do, there’s one thing certain; they’ll be sure to come out wrong and leave me in a fix.”

“But you’re glad of all the poetry you’ve learned to like,” went on Fluffy, “and of the serious reading you’ve done and got off your mind for good. And the history and civil government will come in handy in polite conversation. But for real, downright, sit-up-and-take-notice interest, give me this sociology business. I tell you it sets a person thinking! If it didn’t make me sort of faint to poke around in dirty, smelly places, I believe I should take up settlement work next winter. Lots of the girls in the class want to.”

“Is sociology all about poor people?” inquired Timmy Wentworth. “Because I think myself that rich people are just exactly as interesting. Unless poor people are funny enough to make you laugh I think they’re often very dull indeed. Consequently I don’t believe settlement work is all fun and frolic.”

“It’s about both rich and poor people,” explained Fluffy patiently. “But it hasn’t anything much to do with their being bright or stupid. That comes in psych. mostly—people’s minds. It’s more about,—well, their all getting their rights, you know, and having a fair chance.”

“Oh, yes, and the woman question means woman’s rights, I suppose,” piped up Susanna Hart, still scornfully.

“Well, you want your rights, don’t you?” Straight demanded, coming to Fluffy’s rescue, as she always did the minute an outsider attacked her sister. “I never noticed you giving away bath hours or chances at library books, and your reputation as a freshman roommate——” Straight paused and smiled meaningly around the circle. “No use raking up last year’s scandal,” she ended mildly, perceiving from Susanna’s flushed face that she had scored.

“Well, but that’s different, Straight,” protested Susanna, humbled, but not ready to yield her point. “Of course I take what’s coming to me. I certainly don’t intend to lie down and be walked over by—by anybody.” Susanna clenched her small hands wrathfully, as she remembered the tyrannical last year’s roommate. “I didn’t mean to be more disagreeable about it than I had to, but I want——”

“Exactly,” popped in Straight coolly. “You want your rights.”

“Well, I don’t want to vote,” snapped Susanna, “and I think suffragists are horrid bores.”

“How many do you know, Susanna?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.

“Celissa Seaton and—you,” retorted Susanna. “Of course you’re not a bore in general, Fluffy dear, but if you’re going off on that horrid subject——”

“Well, of course I can’t talk very interestingly about it,” Fluffy conceded diplomatically. “I don’t know enough to. But you should hear Miss Seaton. You’d have to find some other word besides bore to express your opinion of her, because you simply couldn’t call her that. She gets all pink and excited, and she looks positively pretty in spite of her hair. Don’t you know how Miss Ferris is always saying that everybody is interesting if you can only find the right thing to talk about? Well, Miss Seaton is just splendid on the woman question.”

“And are you really a suffragist, Fluffy?” inquired Sallie Wright, in an awestruck voice. Not being at all clever herself, Sallie admired the Duttons from a safe distance, and spent hours pondering over their idiosyncrasies.

“Oh, not so you’d notice it,” Fluffy told her. “Sorry to reduce the number of your suffragist friends to one, Susanna; but I’m still on the fence. I’ve chosen the anti-suffrage position for my final essay in the course, but so far, I may say, the arguments look to me pretty slim. If any idiotic man can vote, why in the world shouldn’t we?”

“I thought Montana Marie’s extra-special show settled all that foolishness,” said Timmy Wentworth. “It made fun of all those queer advanced notions, specially suffrage, and as far as I could see it did ’em up brown.”

Fluffy sighed again patiently. “There you go again. It made fun! You can make fun of anything—anything under the sun. But what have you proved? What did that silly suffrage skit prove? What did our ‘Before Breakfast, Never After’ farce prove? Nothing!” concluded Fluffy dramatically.

“Well, they were certainly oceans of fun,” declared Sallie Wright feelingly.

“And apparently they did oceans of harm,” Fluffy took her up, “if they gave you and Timmy and all your little pals the idea that nonsense like that is any real argument against the sensible modern ideas about women. Miss Seaton felt that way about the show, but I thought she was dippy. Now I’m almost sorry I went in for it.”

“I believe Fluff’s got a crush on Celissa Seaton,” Straight called across Fluffy in a stage whisper directed at Montana Marie. Before Fluffy had time to retort, the door opened and Georgia Ames appeared.

“Oh, Georgia!” Fluffy welcomed her with enthusiasm. “Come and help me explain about sociology to these infants.”

Georgia grinned cheerfully around the circle, dropped down Turk-fashion on the floor by the window, emptied the candy-box of its small remaining store, and complied in her usual effective fashion with Fluffy’s request. “Celissa Seaton is certainly making a hit this term. I’ve just come from a wild sociological discussion on the shores of the swimming tank. We about decided to organize a College Woman’s Rights Club. Let’s do it right now, and get ahead of that other bunch.”

“Splendid!” cried Susanna Hart traitorously. Susanna knew when she was beaten, and she had no desire to lead a lost cause against Georgia and the twins. “I just love to help organize things.”

“So do I,” agreed Montana Marie. “Only why not organize something a little more amusing, while we’re about it? Eating is the feature of clubs that always appeals most to me.”

“But there’s no point in organizing anything amusing at this late date,” Straight explained. “That is, not for us seniors.”

“Besides, we’ve done plenty of that sort of thing before,” added Georgia. “We’ve bequeathed any number of amusing organizations to Harding. Now we propose to bequeath something useful.”

“And of course we depend on the rest of you to keep it going when we’re gone,” added Fluffy, smiling seductively at Susanna.

“All right,” agreed the little sophomore.

“We’re all for it, if you say the word,” put in Timmy.

“I’ll do my best,” promised Sallie, who had only the vaguest idea of Georgia’s intentions.

“I guess I should do better if we had real eats at the first meeting,” giggled Montana Marie.

No one paid any attention to her frivolity. Susanna wondered politely why college girls should bother about votes, when of course they couldn’t vote yet a while. Georgia explained that working women’s rights were just as interesting and important as suffrage, and that anyway the projected organization was to begin right at home, with the problems of college life.

“You see,” she explained, “if women are maybe going to vote and to learn how to run unions and protect their own interests and look out for their children, why, of course we college people ought to be ready to take hold. But how can we, if we’ve never had any experience in sticking together and thinking about the public good? So what we thought of—only I was just going to explain it all out nicely when most of the crowd had to go up to a mob rehearsal for the senior play—what we thought of was to form a self-government association, to make rules for the college and arrange to carry them out, and—oh, just generally run the ship of state.”

“What gorgeousness!” Straight gave a long sigh of admiration. “Why couldn’t you think of an elegant scheme like that while we were on hand to profit by it? Freshman year was the time for a thing like that.”

“But we hadn’t had sociology then,” chorused Georgia and Fluffy apologetically.

“Well, don’t let’s organize it now,” pleaded Straight. “It’s bad enough to be almost through Harding, and I simply couldn’t bear it if I thought that those”—waving comprehensively at the lower class girls—“were still here, going to bed when they were sleepy, and not bothering about cuts or study-hours or any of the other trifling annoyances of Harding life.”

“And the next year’s freshmen can sit on the note-room table if they want to,” giggled Montana Marie joyously.

“Nonsense!” Susanna Hart told her sternly. “That’s not a regular rule; it’s an unwritten law, and you can’t change it any more than you can change the color of your hair.”

“Oh!” said Montana Marie slowly. “They write down the rules that everybody knows, and the ones that——”

“They don’t actually write down any of the rules,” interrupted Susanna tartly, annoyed at being caught in a contradiction.

“Oh!” repeated Montana Marie. “That’s the real difference between college and boarding-school, isn’t it? I’m glad I’ve found out about that at last. But if they’re all unwritten rules, and unwritten rules can’t be changed, what will be the use of your club? Oh, dear, I promised to be home at five, so I can’t wait to have you explain.”

“Come to the grand rally to-morrow afternoon,” Georgia ordered, “and everything will be revealed. We’ll depend on you to get out all the freshmen.”

The next day it rained—a fact which, combined with Montana Marie’s industry in stirring up the freshmen, and with the prevalent interest in self-government, to produce a mammoth mass-meeting. The Dutton twins, whose method of getting things done, inherited from Madeline Ayres, was to make them seem exclusive and therefore highly desirable, sat in the back row and scoffed at the earnestness with which small points were debated, and at the absurd length of time it took to adopt a simple constitution and elect the smallest possible quota of officers. Georgia Ames was made president. The Duttons resented the reproachful way she stared at them when she introduced Miss Seaton, who spoke on the modern woman so exhaustively that even the admiring Fluffy was finally caught yawning. Next came Betty Wales, who, trying to be brief, left her hearers somewhat confused about the status of self-government, as she had officially investigated it in other colleges for women. And then even the Duttons ceased fidgeting, and, like the other chief organizers, waited breathlessly for Georgia’s next announcement, on which, to the initiated, everything depended; Georgia was to appoint the executive committee, and the executive committee would do the rest; that is, they would revise the present college rules and have general charge of enforcing the new code. Georgia made a little preliminary speech about President Wallace’s faith in the girls and in any experiment that they honestly wanted to try. Then she read the committee list: six prominent girls of the type who could always be relied upon to do the sensible thing, and Fluffy Dutton.

Fluffy jumped up to resign, but Straight persuaded her to wait, and having waited, Fluffy declared that no power on earth should keep her from acting on Georgia’s old committee. Before she knew it the committee had elected her chairman.

“That’s only so I’ll come to all the meetings,” grumbled Fluffy. “They’re so afraid of not having a quorum.”

“I hope you’re fixing it about the note-room table,” Montana Marie reminded her. “Because if they’re all unwritten, I don’t see why you can’t change one rule as well as another, and I think that one is positively unfair.”

“Don’t be silly, child,” Straight ordered sharply. “Fluffy can’t be bothered with any little fiddling custom like the note-room table business. She’s fighting the ten o’clock rule. She’s been using all her influence to get the committee to report against it, and if she does, and the girls can hereafter use their judgment about going to bed, why, all the bother we’ve had in organizing and starting the self-government plan going will have been well worth while, in my opinion.”

Fluffy sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “But I think myself that looking out for your rights is a terrible lot of bother. If you leave it all to the faculty, they manage things fairly well for you, and you have your time free for fun.”

“But that’s not good sociology, Fluffy,” Susanna Hart reminded her with malicious sweetness. “If we’re going to learn to help the working women, and to purify politics and so on, we must first understand how to help ourselves and manage our own little republic.”

“I suppose so,” muttered Fluffy, and went off to a meeting of her hopelessly sensible committee. They had devoted one session each to the various college regulations, had debated them “backward and forward and crisscross,” as Fluffy had irritably confided to Straight, and had ended each time by ratifying the existing rule exactly as it stood.

“We don’t want to be too radical,” the most sensible and the slowest of them all invariably declaimed at each decision. “We don’t want to antagonize any one by unnecessary upheavals.”

Fluffy had prodded them on, but she had taken no special part in the debates. For if they changed nothing else, she argued, mustn’t they in sheer self-defense do away with the ten o’clock rule? And to-day at last the ten o’clock rule was reached. Naturally Fluffy was worried and irritable. Besides, she had quarreled with Georgia over the make-up of the committee, and she suspected that Georgia had intended the committee to let things alone—that she actually agreed with them about upheavals and being too radical. Fluffy had scorned to ask Georgia a point-blank question about her attitude to the ten o’clock rule.

“Well,” said the most hopelessly sensible committee member, when Fluffy had called the session to order, “I suppose the discussion to-day will be more or less of a formality. I don’t suppose any of us would consider changing the most important and carefully considered regulation that has been imposed on our college life.”

“Is that the—the general sentiment?” asked Fluffy desperately; and was met on all sides by vigorous nods of approval. “Then,” she went on hastily, “let’s adjourn at once, before it’s too late to get a canoe or a tennis court or something else amusing for the rest of the afternoon.”

“There’s just one thing more,” objected the highly sensible member. “I suppose it’s understood that, under the self-government plan, we’re in honor-bound to keep the rules we make. We must provide for a discipline committee to act in cases of carelessness or deliberate disregard, but I’m sure there’ll be very little of that sort of thing now that the girls can feel that they’re their own law-makers. Isn’t it just splendid that we could put the plan through this year?”

“Is all of that carried?” inquired Fluffy, reckless of parliamentary procedure. “Well, now we can adjourn.”

Of the various amusing things with which one may fill a broken afternoon at Harding, Fluffy chose the company of Montana Marie O’Toole and the pursuit of chocolate soda.

“I take back some of what I said about sociology,” she told Montana Marie over the soda. “It’s interesting and up to date, but it’s very misleading. It doesn’t tell anything about the bother of protecting your rights. Why, it’s even dangerous to try to protect them! Here we are now, honor-bound to keep their old rules—just so much worse off than before. And all because I got excited over the woman question, and Georgia has such a practical mind and loves to try experiments.”

But Mary Brooks Hinsdale, having seen the pair through the window and sacrificed her dignity to join them in the pursuit of soda, refused to view the sociological episode as an utter failure.

“Plenty of people would say to you: the moral of that is to let well enough alone,” said Mary. “But a much nicer moral, I think, is: try again and you’ll come out better. Besides, Fluffy, don’t you honestly think that the good old Harding rules work pretty well?”

Fluffy nodded dubiously. “The main thing I’ve learned,” she explained, “is that whatever is worth having in this world—like the right to make your own rules—is a bother to get and a bother to use. But I guess that’s no reason for not going in for the worth-while things.”

“Let’s have another soda all round,” suggested Montana Marie.