Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/76

 sixes, and dress in squads, and sleep, if at all, in morris chairs, for the next two glamorous nights. . . . Freshmen drifted about the campus, trying hard to look as though they didn't know anything unusual was happening and fervently desiring the coming of the day when they should be sophomores and free to participate. The woman-hating element, clad defiantly in their oldest and worst, circulated in groups, jeering at immaculate contemporaries. "Hey, Bill, where'd you get the hat?" . . . "My God, look at Beany!" . . . "She sure ought to fall for those socks, old man!" . . . "Barber kinda ruined you, didn't he, Jay?" . . . Later they would hang out of windows fronting the street and from this vantage point regard the influx of beauty with a jaundiced eye. Most haughtily critical were the woman-haters. And eagle-eyed. That girl was too fat. That one was too skinny. And oh, boy, look at the bowlegs on this one!

As Jock had feared, Molly recovered with astonishing ease and celerity from the fit of pique that had marked their parting in September, and was coming to the prom in high feather. Repeatedly he cursed himself for ever having asked her in the first place, and several times he was on the point of retracting his invitation so that he might have Yvonne as his guest instead. No doubt he would have done so had it not been for Yvonne herself. She maintained that nothing on earth could induce her to attend under such conditions. "I wouldn't be as mean as that to anyone," she said.

The sense of fair play inherent in Jock approved