you can’t swim?” asked Betty.
“No such luck! All women may look alike to him, but not all strokes in swimming.”
“How did you manage all term?” inquired Patricia, shaking her yellow mop of hair vigorously.
“Oh, he was always hollering at me.”
There were two divisions of the Sophomore Gymnasium class. Clarice was in the second, while all the rest of the Alley Gang were in the first. To be able to swim was absolutely necessary for promotion to the Junior class at the end of the year, and the second week in May had been assigned for the final tests. Professor Wilson, a critical, quick-tempered little man, was an excellent teacher, but he did not like women and never bothered to get acquainted with the individual members of his classes, which did not at all add to his popularity.
“When I can swim out of doors by myself, I think I shall like it,” commented Anne, “but not while Professor Wilson dances around the rim of the pool snapping like a turtle.”
“That’s the way I feel about it,” agreed Patricia. “Why don’t we go out to Green Lake some Saturday and try our skill?”
“Let’s go next Saturday,” proposed Katharine enthusiastically. “We’ll go in the morning, and have a roast.”
“Who?” asked Betty.
“Us and the rest of the Gang. Everybody willing, hold up the left foot,” directed Katharine.
A laughing scramble ensued during which Clarice nearly fell off the railing. When they had settled back into their former positions, Patricia suggested hesitatingly, “Let’s take Rhoda. She’s so very nice to all of us.”
“Good idea,” agreed Katharine promptly.
“But who’d take her place?” questioned Betty doubtfully. “Could she get off for the whole day?”
“I think so. That day she was ill, Sue Mason subbed for her; and she probably would again. Sue doesn’t have many dates,” said Frances.
“I wish we could invite her, too, then,” said Patricia slowly. “It must be pretty lonely to be among so many girls, and not be in on their good times.”
“I know, but you can’t start asking people from upstairs,” protested Anne. “If you do, there’ll be no stopping place.”
“What’s the matter with Sue, anyhow?” asked Patricia.
“Mostly her queer ways,” replied Clarice quickly. “Last year she was always rapping on people’s doors and asking them to keep quiet so she could study. Then she complained to the Dean every so often about how long some of the girls kept her out of the bathroom. She also felt it her duty to report the maid several times for being late in distributing the clean linen. In short, Sue just disapproved of the way everything was run, and got herself in most awfully wrong. She belongs in some boarding house, not in a dorm.”
“How did she happen to come back here, since she found so much fault with the place?” inquired Patricia.
“Don’t know. Maybe she found out that she liked it after all. Hasn’t opened her mouth this year, so the girls upstairs say; but she queered herself for good and all last year,” replied Clarice carelessly. “But to return to my original question, can’t I interest any of you in helping me out?”
“I don’t know what we could do,” began Anne.
“Go into the pool for me when my name is called,” answered Clarice boldly. “There’s a ten in it for anybody who will.”
“You’re surely not in earnest,” said Patricia, pushing back her hair to look directly at the girl on the railing above her. Patricia was so easily embarrassed for others, frequently an embarrassment in which the “others” took no part.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” retorted Clarice.
“Why, Clarice!” cried Frances reprovingly.
“I can’t help it if you are shocked. If it were as necessary for any of you to be graduated from this institution as it is for me, you’d go the limit, too!” Clarice’s tone was defiant, but as she slid off of the railing and hurried into the house, Patricia who was still watching her saw sudden tears fill the girl’s hard, black eyes.
Anne shrugged her shoulders as the back door banged. Frances raised her eyebrows and looked troubled. Betty and Katharine nonchalantly continued the business of hair drying. Patricia sighed—“I wish we could help her out,” she said thoughtfully. “I know a little of what graduation means—”
“Then why doesn’t she work?” demanded Betty sharply.
No one was able to answer that question, so after a moment they began to discuss plans for the picnic. In the meantime a girl who had been sitting quietly at an open window above the back porch left her room and went in search of Clarice.
By four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the swimming tests were over and the gym was filled with chattering girls discussing the probabilities of success and failure.
“I won’t draw a full breath until I see the list posted,” declared Frances, as she left the building with Anne and Patricia.
“I imagine we all passed,” observed Anne placidly.
“Wish I knew how poor Clarice came out,” said Patricia. “Yet I hate to ask her right out.”
“Haven’t heard her mention the subject since Saturday morning,” said Frances. “Have you?”
Both girls shook their heads.
“Maybe she took some time to practice, and managed to pull through,” suggested Anne. “Clarice can do almost anything if she tries.”
“I truly hope so,” said Patricia fervently.
That evening the Alley Gang was in such a furore over arrangements for the picnic that the test was not even mentioned.
“Isn’t the water going to be awfully cold so early in the season?” objected Jane, when the question of “eats” had been satisfactorily settled, and that of bathing was under discussion.
“If the day is fairly warm, and we go in where it’s sunny, I think it will be all right,” replied Katharine.
“All right for an out-door girl like you,” retorted Betty, with a shiver, “but it doesn’t sound altogether attractive to me.”
“Then stay out of it,” advised Katharine sensibly.
“Yes; anybody who doesn’t want to go in can get busy around the fireplace and have a big feed all ready for us. We’ll be starved.”
“Never saw you when you weren’t, France,” called Clarice, who just then appeared in the doorway of Jane’s room where the girls had congregated.
“Know anybody who runs up to the Varsity Shoppe any oftener than you do?” retorted Frances quickly.
“Don’t quarrel, children,” admonished Jane. “We can
