"Oh, you've come from the University of Minnesota."
Fidelia hesitated a minute and then said: "No. I've come from Leland Stanford." Again she corrected, frankly, "I mean I went to Leland Stanford last. I've not been at college at all for a year and a half. I'm just starting again."
"Oh!" Mrs. Fansler considered. "You began at Minnesota and then went to Stanford." She did not add, aloud, "and now you're coming here." But she might as well have said it. Yet neither her thought nor her quick glance over Fidelia was unfriendly. For Mrs. Fansler instinctively liked this girl; and, having been in charge of a student boarding house for girls throughout more than a generation, Mrs. Fansler rather prided herself upon the veracity of her instinct. She thought: "This girl hasn't gotten along." Then she thought, more definitely: "She's got into trouble."
Mrs. Fansler said aloud: "Surely you know Tau Gamma has a chapter here."
"Oh, yes; that's why I'm taking this off before I see any one in college. I don't think it right for a girl, who was initiated by one chapter to force herself on the girls of another college, who mightn't want to take her in. Do you?"
"Why, they'll want you!" Mrs. Fansler exclaimed while she realized that she spoke the truth only in a limited way. For she knew that Tau Gamma—or any other group of girls in college—would want to own this girl in the sense that each sorority would prefer to possess her rather than give her to another. But Mrs. Fansler could not imagine Tau Gamma, or
