Dorothy nodded solemnly. “That’s why I help Nora clean the silver and put the menu cards around on all the tables ’most every day.”
“Of course it is,” Betty took her up eagerly. “You help a lot—I couldn’t get along at all without my dear little company. But you’ll help the most you ever have if you’ll be just as quiet as a little gray mouse until I’ve finished my letter.”
Dorothy considered. “I might draw pictures,” she suggested tentatively at last.
“Of course you might.” Betty handed her a pencil and paper.
“But I haven’t any good place to sit,” Dorothy demurred. “I ought to have a desk just as much as you.”
“Dorothy Wales,”—Betty’s voice was very solemn,—“if I let you sit down here, will you promise, ‘cross your heart,’ not to speak another word until I’ve finished my letter?”
Dorothy nodded her head so vigorously that her hair ribbon came off and had to be tied on again. Then she established herself at the desk, and Betty lighted more candles and moved her writing materials into the stall of Jack of Hearts. The big room was still, save for the scratching of Betty’s pen and an occasional loud “ahem” from Dorothy whose throat was always affected queerly in church or anywhere else where she was denied the joys of fluent conversation.
As Betty wrote, the hopelessness of the situation grew clearer and clearer. It seemed a waste of words to explain it all, when there was absolutely nothing to be done.
“What do girls know about business, anyway?” Will had said that with his most scornful air, when Betty had first proposed the tea-room project. Well, he was right. A man would have thought about a contract. A man would have managed somehow to make out a case in behalf of the Tally-ho. But how? Betty went over the conversation, trying to think what she could have said, how she could have answered Mr. Harrison’s questions so as to defeat his plans. But she had no inspiration. He was the owner of the barn. If he wanted higher rent, he had a right to it. To be sure, people sometimes wanted what they couldn’t get. But he had said—
“I ought to have taken him up about that,” Betty reflected sadly. “I ought to have asked him if he was perfectly sure that any other people would pay such a lot more than we have. Madeline would have got him all confused about it, and perhaps he’d have let us stay.”