These conclusions were not reached without much digression, circumlocution, and irrelevant discourse upon various matters, with a good deal of consideration of the dress which would be both convenient and becoming for the important games.
“I have almost a mind to try a divided skirt,” Betty said thoughtfully. “George saw one at a tournament in England, and it could be fixed so as not— Oh, Dora, if George were only here! He knows all the new English rules and cuts, and all sorts of quirks. Oh, why did you have to quarrel with him just now? Now I shall lose my tennis just because you drove him away from Maugus.”
“Why, Betty Mork! You said yourself you wouldn’t stand his lordly ways; you know you did.”
“Of course,” returned her friend illogically; “but we both agreed that you’d have to make up with him some time; and I didn’t know then that I should want him.”
“But what could I do?” demanded Dora, divided between a sense of being deserted by her friend and a desire to have difficulties smoothed over. “Any girl with decent pride would have had to send George away. You know how I hated to do it.”
“But you might send for him now.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. That would be too awfully humiliating. I wonder you can propose it.”
“Men are so dreadful,” sighed Betty.
The two forlorn victims of masculine perversity pensively ate marshmallows in silence for a moment, revolving, no doubt, the most profound reflections upon the vanity of human affairs.
“I’ll tell you what I will do,” Betty said at length, reflectively. “I’ll write to George and make him visit grandmother. He hasn’t been there for a year, to stay; and, as grandmother says, she ‘admires to have him.’ I’ll tell him if he’ll stay there, out of sight, I think I can fix things with you.”