Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she persisted a bit thickly.  “Sure the Typhoid Boy was crazy about me!  He called me his ‘Holy Chorus Girl,’ I heard him—­raving in his sleep.  Lord save us!  What are we to any man but just that?” she questioned hotly with renewed venom.  “Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint—­I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn’t turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him?  Mawking about your ‘sweet eyes’ while you’re wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle!  Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they—­never had!  Trying to kiss your finger tips when you’re struggling to brush their teeth!  Teasin’ you to smoke cigarettes with ’em—­when they know it would cost you your job!”

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed at one homely square-toed shoe in a mincy dancing step.  Hoydenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compass.

“Oh, you Holy Chorus Girls!” she chuckled with maniacal delight.  “Everybody, all together, now!  Kick your little kicks!  Smile your little smiles!  Tinkle your little thermometers!  Steady,—­there!  One—­two—­three—­One—­two—­three!”

Laughingly Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp.  “Don’t you dare ‘holy’ me!” she threatened.

In real irritation Helene released herself.  “I’m no chorus girl,” she said coldly.

With a little shrill scream of pain Rae Malgregor’s hands went flying back to her temples.  Like a person giving orders in a great panic she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.

“Now, girls,” she warned, “stand well back!  If my head bursts, you know, it’s going to burst all to slivers and splinters—­like a boiler!”

“Rae, you’re crazy!” hooted Zillah.

“Just plain vulgar—­looney,” faltered Helene.

Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird’s note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime.  To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor’s jangled nerves were waiting for.

“Oh, I am crazy, am I?” she cried with a new, fierce joy.  “Oh, I am crazy, am I?  Well, I’ll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am!  Oh, surely they wouldn’t try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!”

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door.  Just what the motto was no one but herself knew.  Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.