“I wish to goodness you would,” declared Lillian. “Bettie’s all right, but Augusta and I are all alone in number twenty-six.”
“Do move in today,” pleaded Augusta. “There’s a vacant bed—really, that’s one reason why the room is so scary. It’s bad enough to have to look under one’s own bed without having that extra one—we’ve been taking turns. Let’s go and ask Miss Woodruff to let you come—she’s the matron in our corridor, you know.”
“I was about to suggest that very thing,” replied Miss Woodruff, regarding burglar-proof Victoria with a quizzical eye. “If this brave Victoria can instill some of her surplus courage into this quaking Lillian and this shuddering Augusta, by all means let her do it.”
“Victoria is really almost too courageous,” remarked Mrs. Henry Rhodes, when the girls had left the school room. “She just bristles with bravery. I’d like to frighten her just once. She’d have made a fine boy, wouldn’t she, with those broad, sturdy shoulders!”
“She’d have made a blustering one. I suspect that if she had been one, every other boy that knew her would have been tempted to put her bravery to the test. I don’t think that boys take as kindly to braggarts as girls do.”
But even the girls, with the exception of timid Lillian and terrified Augusta, began to grow tired of Victoria’s boasting; for, braced by the admiring devotion of her roommates, Victoria could talk of nothing but her own bravery.
“If a burglar came,” Victoria would brag, “I’d look him straight in the eye and say: ‘See here, Mr. Burglar, I want to talk to you as man to man. I take it you’re a man of sense. Your time is valuable. You’re wasting it here. We’ve only thirty cents a week pocket money. If you were mean enough to take it all you wouldn’t get much. Our jewels came from the five and ten cent store; so just run along to a place where they really have money.’”
“Would you really?” demanded Augusta.
“Yes, I would. I’ve never seen the time yet when I’ve really been afraid of anything.”
“They say,” quavered Lillian, “that they found footsteps—yes, Marjory, I meant foot-prints—under the Browns’ dining room window last Friday—only three houses from this one. Oh, I’m so scared I can’t eat my meals.”