trictly informal affair. Grace had
suspected that the girls whom the members of the Phi Sigma Tau were to
entertain were not likely to possess evening gowns. In order to avoid
any possibility of hurt feelings, she had quietly requested those
invited to wear the afternoon gowns in which they would appear at the
game.

Before one o'clock her guests had arrived. They were three shy, quiet
girls who had worshiped Grace from a distance, and who had been
surprised almost to tears by her invitation. Two of them were from
Portville, a small town about seventy miles from Oakdale, and had begun
High School with Grace, who had been too busy with her own affairs up to
the present to find out much about them.

The other girl, Marie Bateman, had entered the class that year. She had
come from a little village forty miles south of Oakdale, was the oldest
of a large family, her mother being a widow of very small means. As her
mother was unable to send her away to school, she had done clerical work
for the only lawyer in the home town for the previous two years,
studying between whiles. She had entered the High School in the junior
class, determining to graduate and then to work her way through Normal
School. By dint of questioning, Grace had discovered that she lived in a
shabby little room in the suburbs, never went anywhere and did anything
honest in the way of earning money that she could find to do.

The realization of what some of these girls were willing to endure for
the sake of getting an education made Grace feel guilty at being so
comfortably situated. She determined that the holidays that year should
not find them without friends and cheer.

After a rousing Thanksgiving dinner, in which the inevitable turkey,
with all its toothsome accompaniments, played a prominent part, the
girls retired to Grace's room for a final adjustment of hair and a last
survey in the mirror before going to the game. High School matters
formed the principal theme of conversation, and Grace was not surprised
to learn that Eleanor had been carrying things with a high hand in
third-year French class, in which Ellen Holt, one of the Portville
girls, recited.

"She speaks French as well as Professor La Roche," said Miss Holt, "but
she nearly drives him crazy sometimes. She will pretend she doesn't
understand him and will make him explain the construction of a sentence
over and over again, or she will argue with him about a point until he
loses his t