"You poor little blessed!" she murmured.
"'Flat your b,'" murmured Billy wearily, and no one laughed. They were all laughers, but the picture of Billy toiling on monotonously in her sleep failed to appeal to them as humorous. T.O. went back silently to her seat.
What the initials T.O. stood for in the way of a name had been the subject of much guessing in the B-Hive, for the owner of the initials refused whimsically to explain them. Perhaps she would sometime when the moon was full or the wind was in the right quarter, she said. Meanwhile T.O. did well enough—as well as "Billy," anyway, or "Laura Ann"! And they fell in gayly with her whimsy and called her T.O. The nearest they had ever come to an answer to their guesses was one night when they had been discussing "talents" and comparing "callings," and T.O. had sat by, a wistful little listener and admirer. For T.O. had no talent, and who would call selling handkerchiefs from morning till night a "calling"? Even sheer, fine handkerchiefs, warranted every thread linen!
"Talentless One," she broke out startlingly. "You want to know what 'T.O.' stands for—that's it!" And the amused look in the girls' eyes changed quickly to understanding at sight of her face. "Well," she challenged, "why don't you say what an appropriate name it is? It's a wonder you talented ones didn't guess it long ago! Listen! Loraine's talent is writing—we all know she'll be an author some day. Laura Ann's is art. Oh, you needn't laugh—need she, girls? One of these days we're all going to a 'hanging,' and it'll be Laura Ann's! Billy's talent everybody knows. She can play wicked folks good, if there's a piano handy. Well, what is my talent? Don't everybody speak at once!" The girl's flushed face defied them. It was bitter with longing to be a Talented One.
"Dear!" It was like gentle Loraine to begin with a "dear," and like her, too, to cross the room to T.O. and touch her little bitter face with cool fingers. "Dear, don't you worry—your talent is there."
"Where?" demanded T.O. Then she laughed. "I suppose you mean buried in a handkerchief! But I shall never be able to dig it out—never! There's such an awful pile of them on top! They keep piling on new ones every day. If I keep on selling handkerchiefs till I'm seventy-five, I'll never get down to my talent."
It was, after all, quite true, though none of them would acknowledge it—except the Talentless One herself. She was, as she insisted, the odd one in the busy little B-Hive. Her very face, small and dark and lean, was an "odd" one; the faces of the other three were marked by an indefinable something that she called talent, and she was not far wrong. A subtle refinement, intellectuality, asserted itself gently in all three of them. The dark little face of T.O. was vivacious and keen, but not refined or intellectual.
Billy was the baby "B," as Loraine was the acknowledged queen. They all favored Billy and took care of her. Was it a rainy morning? Somebody got Billy's rubbers, somebody else her umbrella! Was the child paler than usual? She must have the softest chair and be babied. Poor little toiler-Billy, created to have a mother and a home, to sit always in soft chairs and be taken care of! Yet without them all she was making a splendid struggle for independence, with the best of them, and they were conscious of a certain element of heroism in her toiling that none of the rest of them laid claim to in their own. The other B.'s were proud of Billy.