CHAPTER VI.
THE “DOUBLE THREE.”
This small association of six girls, who were known as the “Double Three,” and who so denominated themselves, had drifted into the very informal organization on account of an accidental performance at Hallowe’en in their junior year. They were friends, more or less intimate then. It chanced that the Mistress of Hallowe’en celebrations, a senior of the year before, had appointed Sidney and Hope to manage some sort of a “stunt,” as those events are called.
The result was an amateur one act play, portraying more or less of a mystery. Sidney wrote most of it, or managed its production. Masks and loose black dominoes were the costume, to which the final touch was given by an oblong badge which represented the face of an ordinary ivory domino, the “double three.” The domino robe had suggested the word; the number of the girls who had been asked by Sidney and Hope to help had suggested the badge; double three sounded so much better than plain six, if something from the game were taken as a symbol.
So much was said about the stunt of the “double threes” that it was only natural for the girls to drift together more often and finally to call themselves the Double Threes, with occasional meetings and good times. But it must not be supposed that it was a definite or recognized society or anything like a sorority, for sororities did not exist in this school.
Fleta Race, Irma Reed, Edith Stuart and Sidney Thorne occupied a suite together. Dulcina Porter and Hope Holland shared one of the single rooms in the dormitory. In their junior year Sidney and Hope had roomed together; but without having any trouble, both had come to the conclusion that it would be good to try not being together, for they were friends when at home. Each would room with a “stranger” and Sidney would try being in a suite. Hope privately thought that she would not like it, for all the ways of simple school living were not what Sidney enjoyed at home. But at that Sidney was an independent soul that wanted to see if she could do what other girls did. She was not the only daughter of wealthy parents among the students here.
Previous to her sophomore year Sidney had been tutored at home, and hard indeed she found it to make up all the loose ends of her freshman year. Hope had attended another school until her junior year, when she had come to join Sidney after hearing her accounts of its superior advantages. But then, everything that Sidney did, everything that she had, all connected with herself and her family, were considered just right by the cool Sidney, so sure was she, so blandly superior to mistakes or criticism.
Hope felt a sense of relief to have no one but dainty unselfish little Dulcie around. Yet there was a charm about the superior Sidney after all, and Hope loved her. In the real living together, Sidney’s gentle training made it impossible for her to be discourteous or disagreeable. It was that unconscious assumption of superiority that Hope disliked, though she could not have analyzed it. Sidney was “proud,” she would have said. Money had nothing to do with it, for Sidney at least thought that she admired achievement and ability above everything. It was quite likely that she did not even give her father credit for having successfully managed a large business and money which he had inherited. Practical ability is not to be despised, and it is only the love of money that is the root of evil, or the silly ostentation that sometimes accompanies it.
Leaving the campus, the girls of the Double Three strolled into the parlors, where several other girls at once ran up to Sidney, as she was the latest arrival.
“I looked everywhere for you, Sidney,” said one. “Where in the world did you disappear to?”
“Oh, the girls got hold of me after I was dressed. We had so much to talk about that we went down in the grove to look at the lake and stayed there, gibbering, longer than we intended. I wanted to hunt up some more of you.” Sidney was swinging hands with this bright-eyed girl as she spoke.
“Hello, Thorne in the flesh,” cried another very tall girl, who looked down upon the shorter Sidney as she spoke. “Going to beat me in everything this year?”
“Going to try to, Olive,” returned Sidney, whirling around to look up at her old rival and exchange mild embraces.
“Well, look out, that’s all,” laughed Olive, moving away with a salute.
“Listen, Sidney,” said another miss who was trying to get to Sidney through the group. “There is going to be a meeting of the athletic board right after dinner in the library. Don’t you forget it and do something else!”
“All right, Dorothy. I’ll be there.”
There were other girls, who did not rush to meet Sidney, and one who joined the tall, competent looking Olive Mason, as she walked away from Sidney’s group, made a somewhat critical remark. “I don’t see why you should welcome Sidney Thorne so cordially, Olive. She did everything but cheat to beat you last year.”
“Good sportmanship, my dear,” replied Olive. “She didn’t cheat and it is up to me to see that my work is better than hers.”
“I think that it is, Ollie. It was just favoritism that gave her the higher grades! Sidney Thorne is a little snob!”
“I’d show myself pretty small, if I said that favoritism gave Sidney the higher grades, so never mind, Barbie. Please don’t say anything like that around where the girls can hear you. They all know that you are such a friend of mine and they might think that I felt that way. It wouldn’t look well, to say the least, Barbara.”
“Don’t worry. If I express an opinion about Sidney, I’ll see that the girls know it is my own, not yours. I’ll say this for Sidney Thorne, that she doesn’t push herself in; but she just loves it that they put her on all the boards and committees and make much of her.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” asked the fair-minded Olive. “Who wouldn’t like it? She has ideas, and is pretty and charming. I don’t say that it does not spoil her a little, but I thought it out this summer. I was jealous and disappointed, Barbie, but I decided to go right ahead seeing what I can do on my own account. I imagine that every one of us can make some place for herself if she tries!”
Barbara Sanford looked keenly at Olive. “You’re one mighty fine girl, Olive!” she exclaimed. “The girls know it, too!”
“That is good of you to say, Barbie, but it would be a pity if I hadn’t learned a few things by being in this school three years and ‘playing the game’ under our athletic director,—and isn’t it terrible, Barbie?—she’s engaged!”
“What! The Water Nymph going to leave us?”
“Sh-sh! There she is. Why, she is back for part of the year anyhow, and perhaps she will not be married before next summer.”
“I wish it had been Miss Gibson, or the math teacher. But that is the way it always is!”
“Barbie the pessimist!” laughed Olive.
After dinner Sidney was promptly on hand at the meeting of the “athletic board,” announced also at dinner. Sidney was feeling especially happy about everything. It was really glorious to be a senior, with more privileges, among the “high and mighty,” so far as age and position were concerned. Sidney knew too, that she had worked hard in these years, to justify her parents’ faith in her and to satisfy herself that she could.
The meeting was a short one, however. There were no lesson hours, but as the girls were expected to be in their rooms at a reasonable time, Sidney ran up to her suite immediately, to help her suite-mates put everything to rights. She was glowingly happy. “This is going to be the greatest fun yet,” she said. “What do you think one of the girls said to me? I won’t tell you who it was, though. She said, ‘why don’t you and the rest of the Double Three set it up about some of these elections? You could have things the way you want them!’”
Dulcie and Hope had come in and were sitting on one of the single beds, watching Fleta unpack and hang away a few last garments. Edith, mending one of last year’s cushions too pretty to be thrown away, came in and plumped herself down beside Hope.
“What did you say to that?” asked Hope, watching Sidney, who was looking critically at the arrangement of the dresser and was changing the position of several knick-knacks.
“I said nothing, says I,” facetiously answered Sidney, looking into the mirror and giving her aristocratic nose a dab with the puff from her vanity case. And it may be remarked that Sidney was also enough of an aristocrat to powder that same nose nowhere else than in her boudoir or some equally private place.
“However,” she continued, “why not use a little influence if we have it? Why be seniors for nothing?”
“They will say that we do it anyhow,” approvingly Dulcie added, swinging her slippered feet under the bed and out again. “They did last year; don’t you remember, Hope?”
“Being accused of a thing and really doing it,” said Hope, “are two very different things.”
Sidney thought that Hope was being “snippy.” She cast a glance in Hope’s direction and brightly asked, “Any objection, Hope?”
“I never cared to belong to a political gang,” laughed Hope. “We see enough of that in Chicago.”
“Calls us a ‘gang,’ girls,” whimpered Fleta, making a comical face.
“Time enough to worry about politics when there is any reason for it,” comfortably said Edith Stuart. “There isn’t any objection to our having our own ideas and working for them, especially if they are for the good of the school and not just to get our own way. Being determined to get her own way and run everybody is like Stella Marbury. I am pretty sure that it was Stella who suggested that to Sidney. Own up, Sidney. Stella wants to be one to make this a Double Four, Sidney.”
Sidney was now sitting on a straight chair in a corner by a window. “Does she?” she asked, with no change of countenance.
“If it was Stella, you’ll not get Sidney to acknowledge it now,” said Irma Reed, leaning up against the frame of the door and watching Sidney Thorne with amused eyes. “My opinion is that the Double Three’d better keep in the background unless we want the dean to consider us a sorority and tell us that we simply can’t exist. We might make it a little reading club, if we want to have it a real club. There would be no objection to that.”
“I wouldn’t even do that,” said Edith. “We are just congenial friends. If anybody reaches the same intimacy with us we might be a Double Four, perhaps. But we are not considering applications, are we, Sidney?”
“I should think not!” said Sidney, with emphasis.