Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/83

 "Gee, he did pick a quince, didn't he?" muttered Bones.

Jock looked thoughtful. "I believe I kind of like her," he said. And added, as Bones stared incredulously, "Anyway, I'm sorry for the poor little kid."

The girls who attend college proms are tabulated neatly within an hour of their arrival. In undergraduate language, they are either knockouts, or else they're dull thuds. There is no middle class, The knockouts enjoy two days of exhilarating popularity and unalloyed bliss. The dull thuds look on and wonder miserably why they had been so awfully excited about coming. ..

Everybody in the Zeta Kappa house—members of the fraternity, visiting young ladies, everybody—knew that Dopey Lane's prom-girl was a dull thud. They knew it the minute she came downstairs to join the group congregated in the living room. By the dark blue taffeta gown that bunched in the wrong places they knew it. By the heavy black stockings in a year of sheer flesh-colored ones, and by the hair that wasn't shingled, and by the face that wasn't rouged, and by the lack of self-confidence they knew it. But being ultra-modern boys and girls, unto whom "Everyone for himself" was the law, they did not care. They stared at her, hard, for a second or two. They summed her up, "No looks, no style, no pep." Then they forgot her utterly, the girls because they were not afraid of her, the boys because they were not interested.

Pep! Fuel for the speed of the generation! Sine-