“That’s the truth,” added Bettie.
Gladys locked her trunk ostentatiously, pocketed the key and marched downstairs. Mabel looked at Bettie, Bettie looked at Mabel.
“The buckle on that belt looks a lot like the one that Helen Miller made such a fuss about last fall,” said Mabel.
“I know it does.”
“Do you think we’d better say anything about it to the girls?”
“Let’s ask Jean.”
Now Jean was the kindest soul imaginable. Although she had known many things to Gladys’s disadvantage, she had kept silence herself and had influenced her little friends to keep silence likewise.
“Gladys may have found that buckle,” said Jean, “and of course it’s possible that she and Helen had buckles just alike. I don’t like Laura—I mean Gladys—but I don’t believe we’d better say anything against her to the other girls.”
“She says things against us,” said Mabel. “She told Sallie that my father was just a corn doctor and that all Bettie’s clothes came out of missionary boxes and that Marjory’s Aunty Jane took in washing—and I shan’t tell you what she said about your folks but it was just awful.”
“Well, let’s not worry about it. The girls that we like best aren’t going back on us for anything Gladys can tell them and we don’t have to be mean just because she is.”