The girls were a little displeased—more of that criticism business? they wondered. Even the tempting odor of the cooking candy couldn’t quite appease them.
“It’s just a way to wipe out the faults as soon as possible,” said Peggy with her funny and irresistible little smile. “I thought if we each cured the faults of the others in our own minds, why—where would they be?”
There was an alarming simplicity to this.
Doris dropped her fudge spoon.
“What do you mean, Peggy?” she demanded.
“Well,” laughed Peggy gleefully, delighted with the discovery she and Katherine had made, “that party last night did no good, some way. Everybody went home feeling disgruntled and out of sorts—and overwhelmed more or less with their own imperfections. If each fault-finder just—doesn’t find fault, you know,—even in her own mind, there won’t be any fault pretty soon to be found.”
“Don’t see it,” said Myra Whitewell.
“If you,” Peggy turned to her patiently, “if you just wiped out the notion you had about me—and stopped letting it torment you—that I wanted to run things, you know,—why, why—then you wouldn’t see me like that, would you? Pretty soon every one in Ambler House would be praising every one else, and loving every one so much that the other houses would begin to notice, and would catch the infection. I think it’s better to let our enemies find fault with us, if they must, but not our friends.”
“Ambler House would get a wonderful reputation for having the best freshmen on Campus if we all boosted our house and our classmates everywhere, I can see that,” ventured Florence Thomas eagerly.
“Well, shall we try?” urged Peggy, “shall we just try it out as an experiment?”