Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/126

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Chapter XIII

Cope Dines Again—and Stays After

Medora Phillips' social activities ran through several social strata and her entertainments varied to correspond. Sometimes she contented herself with mere boy-and-girl affairs, which were thrown together from material gathered within her own household and from the humbler walks of undergraduate life. Sometimes she entertained literary celebrities, and invited the head professors and their wives to meet them. And two or three times a season she gave real dinners to "society," summoning to Ashburn avenue, from homes even more architectural than her own, the banking and wholesale families whose incomes were derived from the city, but who pillared both the university and the many houses of worship in Churchton itself. And sometimes, when she passed over the older generation of these families in favor of the younger, her courses were more "liberal" than Churchton's earlier standards quite approved.

On such formal occasions her three young ladies were dispensed with. They were encouraged to go to some sorority gathering or to some fudge-party. On the occasion now meditated she had another young person in mind. This was the granddaughter of one

of the banking families; the girl might come along

118