“It must be an exceedingly crude country,” remarked Hortense, her nose tip-tilted.
“Shocking!” agreed Belle.
“I’d like to go there,” announced Flossie, suddenly. “I think it must be fine.”
“Quite right,” agreed Miss Van Ramsden.
The older Starkweather girls could not go against their most influential caller. They were only too glad to have the Van Ramsden girl come to see them. But while the group were discussing Helen’s story, the girl from Sunset Ranch stole away and went up to her room.
She had not meant to tell about her life in the West—not in just this way. She had tried to talk about as her cousins expected her to, when once she got into the story; but its effect upon the visitors had not been just what either the Starkweather girls, or Helen herself, had expected.
She saw that she was much out of the good graces of Belle and Hortense at dinner; they hardly spoke to her. But Flossie seemed to delight in rubbing her sisters against the grain.
“Oh, Pa,” she cried, “when Helen goes home, let me go with her; will you? I’d just love to be on a ranch for a while—I know I should! And I do need a vacation.”
“Nonsense, Floss!” gasped Hortense.
“You are a perfectly vulgar little thing,” declared Belle. “I don’t know where you get such low tastes.”