“It’s perfectly silly, Lorraine, the way you act. Here you might just as well belong to the Grigs, and have lots of good times; but just because you prefer to consider yourself snubbed at every tack and turn, when nobody means anything of the sort at all, of course you can’t belong to a club whose only object is to be merry and gay.”
“I don’t want to belong to your old Grigs! I think they’re silly, and I hate ’em all!”
“You do want to belong, and you don’t think they’re silly! Now look here, Lorraine, I’m just about at the end of my patience. I’ve done everything I could for you, to make you more like the other girls, and though you’re nicer in some ways than you used to be, yet you’re so foolishly sensitive that you make yourself a lot of trouble that I can’t help. I don’t mind telling you, now that we’re on the subject, that the girls are all ready to take you in as a member of the Grigs, if you’ll be nice and pleasant. But we don’t want any disagreeable members, or any members who insist on thinking themselves snubbed when nobody had any such intention.”
Lorraine stopped crying and looked at Patty with a peculiar expression.
“Do you really mean,” she said, “that you’d take me into the Grigs if I were not so bad-tempered?”
“Well, since you choose to put it that way, that’s just about what I do mean,” said Patty, politely ignoring the fact that Lorraine had declared she didn’t want to be a Grig.
“Well, then I will be better-natured, and stop being so hateful to the girls. Just make me a Grig and I’ll show you.”
“No, Lorraine, that won’t do; you’ve got to prove yourself first. Now, I’ll tell you what—you be real nice to Elise and make her like you, or rather, let her like you, and then there’ll be no trouble about getting you into the society.”
“All right,” said Lorraine, hopefully, “but what can I do? Elise won’t speak to me now.”
“Oh, pshaw! yes, she will. I’ll guarantee that she’ll meet you half-way. Now here’s a plan; you must do something like this. Get your mother to let you invite Elise to come to see you some afternoon, and then invite the Harts and me, too, and have a real jolly afternoon. They’ll all come, and then if you’re nice and pleasant, as you know perfectly well how to be, the girls can’t help liking you. Oh, Lorraine, you’re such a goose! It’s a great deal easier to go through the world happy and smiling than to mope along, glum and cross-grained.”