“Miriam, you’re a darling and a diplomat!” exclaimed Grace, closing the door, which the stout girl had left wide open.  “Chocolate is the one thing calculated to reduce J. Elfreda to reason.  We will feed her, then renew our lectures on tale-bearing.  Never call me a reformer.  I am certain that before the year is over J. Elfreda won’t know herself.”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Miriam.  “She is an interesting specimen, and furnishes variety, of a certain kind,” she added with an impish grin, glancing comprehensively at the disordered room.  “As long as I have taken her unto myself as a roommate I might as well do what I can for her.  What seems so strange to me is that with all her money she is so crude and slangy.  She doesn’t seem to have any ideals or much principle either.  Yet there is something sturdy and frankly independent about her, too, that makes one think she’s worth bothering with after all.”

“How did her father make his money?” asked Grace.

“Lumber,” replied Miriam.  “They own tracts of timber land in Michigan.  Elfreda can have anything she asks for.”

Grace sat down on Miriam’s bed, her chin in her hands.  She was thinking of the note she had just read and wondering what had better be done.  Miriam, despite her avowal that she was tired of picking up her roommate’s scattered clothing, busied herself with reducing Elfreda’s half of the room to some semblance of order.  Going to the closet, she took down an elaborate Japanese silk kimono and laid it across the foot of Elfreda’s bed.

“What had we better do about this note?” Grace asked, picking it up from the table and re-reading it.

“What do you think?” questioned Miriam.

“I think we had better ask the advice of some upper class girl,” said Grace.  “I’m going to see Mabel Ashe to-morrow morning.  I’ll tell her about it.  Elfreda mustn’t be cheated out of her right to go to the reception.”

“But if the whole sophomore class objects to her, what then?”

“I don’t believe the whole sophomore class does object to her,” returned Grace.  “I have a curious conviction that not many of them know her even by sight.  I think that this note was written for spite.”

“Do you think Miss Wicks and Miss Hampton wrote it?” queried Miriam.

“I don’t want to accuse any one of writing it, but they are the only students who would have an object in doing so,” declared Grace.  “I hear Elfreda coming down the hall.  Don’t say anything more about it just now,” she added in a lower tone.

“My goodness, I forgot all about the chocolate!” exclaimed Miriam, scurrying to a little oak cabinet in one corner of the room and taking out the necessary ingredients.  “Here, Grace, open this can of evaporated cream with the scissors.  You can use that paperweight for a hammer.”

Fifteen minutes later, wrapped in the folds of her kimono, J. Elfreda sat drinking chocolate and devouring cakes as though her very existence depended upon it.