This reputation for a high-browed indifference to commonplace mortals was naturally not a recommendation to the masculine undergraduates of the University.  These young men, under the influence of reports of what was done at Cornell and other more eastern co-educational institutions, were already strongly inclined to ignore the co-eds as much as possible.  The tradition was growing rapidly that the proper thing was to invite the “town-girls” to the college proms and dances, and to sit beside them in the grandstand during football games.  As yet, however, this tendency had not gone so far but that those co-eds who were members of a socially recognized fraternity were automatically saved from the neglect which enveloped all other but exceptionally flirtatious and undiscriminating girls.  Each girls’ fraternity, like the masculine organizations, gave one big hop in the course of the season and several smaller dances, as well as lawn-parties and teas and stage-coach parties to the football games.  The young men naturally wished to be invited to these functions, the increasing elaborateness of which kept pace with the increasing sophistication of life in La Chance and the increasing cost of which made the parents of the girls groan.  Consequently each masculine fraternity took care that it did not incur the enmity of the organized and socially powerful sororities.  But Sylvia was not protected by this aegis.  She was not invited during her Freshman year to the dances given by either the sororities or the fraternities; and the large scattering crowd of masculine undergraduates were frightened away from the handsome girl by her supposed haughty intellectual tastes.

Here again her isolation was partly the result of her own wish.  The raw-boned, badly dressed farmers’ lads, with red hands and rough hair, she quite as snobbishly ignored as she was ignored in her turn by the well-set-up, fashionably dressed young swells of the University, with their white hands, with their thin, gaudy socks tautly pulled over their ankle-bones, and their shining hair glistening like lacquer on their skulls (that being the desideratum in youthful masculine society of the place and time).  Sylvia snubbed the masculine jays of college partly because it was a breath of life to her battered vanity to be able to snub some one, and partly because they seemed to her, in comparison with the smart set, seen from afar, quite and utterly undesirable.  She would rather have no masculine attentions at all than such poor provender for her feminine desire to conquer.

Thus she trod the leafy walks of the beautiful campus alone, ignoring and ignored, keenly alive under her shell of indifference to the brilliant young men and their chosen few feminine companions.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. DRAPER BLOWS THE COALS