Evidently the girls were discussing some story that they had been reading, and a very sentimental one at that. A wicked little gleam of triumph came into Mittie's eyes as she listened. For here were Lloyd and Allison and Kitty and Katie Mallard and Betty, actually teasing each other about the boys they liked best. And it hadn't been a week since Lloyd had said, with a scornful little toss of her head, "Oh, Mittie, you make me ti'ahed! Always talking about the boys!" and the four of them had walked off with their arms around each other as if quite disgusted.
"Oh, won't I get even with them now for turning up their noses at me!" exclaimed Mittie to herself, and she pressed her ear closer to the thin partition wall that divided the two closets.
Katie's voice came first: "If I'd been Daisy Dale I'd have fallen in love with Lord Rokeby instead of the Squire's son, because he was tall and fair and blue-eyed."
"Like Charlie Downs," put in Kitty, mischievously. "Oh, girls! Look at her blush!"
"I'm not blushing," protested Katie, wildly.
"But you can't deny that he's the one," insisted Kitty. "Even when we were little and used to play 'lady come to see' you always played that you were Mrs. Downs, you know you did."
"I don't care," pouted Katie. "I don't do it now, and anyhow I don't keep an old dead rose and a valentine and a brass button all tied up in a fancy box with blue ribbon, the way you do, because Guy Ferris gave them to you. N-ow, who's blushing?"
"Katie Mallard, that's something you promised you'd never tell as long as you live!" cried Kitty. "I didn't think you'd be so mean as to go back on your promise." She turned away with such an offended air that Katie saw that her teasing had gone farther than she intended. She hastened to make amends, for she couldn't be happy while there was the slightest misunderstanding between her and her best friend.
"I didn't think you'd care, Kitty. Truly I didn't. I wouldn't have teased you before the other girls, but just here, in our own little club, it oughtn't to make any difference. Why, I don't mind one bit telling you girls that I like Charlie Downs better than any boy I know, and that I felt glad when my apple parings made his initials every time I threw them over my shoulder on Hallowe'en. I don't think it's anything to confess that much, or to care for things a boy gives you as you do for the valentine and the rose. That's a very different matter from talking about the boys as Mittie Dupong does about Carter Brown."
"Well I should think so!" exclaimed Lloyd, in a tone that made Mittie, on the other side of the wall, set her teeth together angrily. "But Mittie isn't like the girls we've always gone with. She's so common! She plays kissing-games. I've nevah had any use for her since Cartah Brown's birthday pahty. When they played Pillow and Post-office, every boy in the room kissed her, and Lollie Briggs and all that set of girls that she goes with. I couldn't undahstand it. Some of them seemed so nice; Flynn Willis, you know, and Caddie Bailey. I wouldn't have thought it of them."