Eugenia received her with studied coldness. She was “very much relieved” to have her theme back. Perhaps Betty would explain to Miss Raymond.
Betty was quite willing to do that. She didn’t blame Eugenia for being vexed about the theme and disappointed about the ploshkins. She would have been, in Eugenia’s place, no doubt; but when she asked Eugenia if she should be down in the afternoon to see Dorothy, and Eugenia replied coldly that she was very busy, and never even sent a message of thanks to the little girl for finding the missing theme—then Betty was vexed in her turn. Dorothy wasn’t to blame for any of Eugenia’s troubles. It would be just as sensible for Miss Raymond to be disagreeable to her because her desk had two secret drawers.
But Miss Raymond was very friendly and very much interested in the two drawers, which she promised to come and see for herself soon. And Nora, won by the suspicion of tears in Betty’s eyes and by the honor of being entrusted with Betty’s unhappy secret, promised to stay a few days longer, until Madeline had come up and they knew how matters stood.
Madeline arrived that very afternoon.
“Show me the drawers,” she demanded before she was well inside the Tally-ho, and to Betty’s dismay she utterly refused to talk business, while she sat for an hour opening one drawer after another, and hunting through the recesses of the desk for more sliding panels or hidden springs.
“For if there are two drawers, there may just as well be three or even four,” she said. “And who knows what may be in them or how long they’ve been lost and forgotten? Don’t look so disgusted, Betty. I ordered the ploshkins the first day I was in New York, and this morning it was too late to change. To-morrow I’ll hunt up your dreadful Mr. Harrison and try my blarney on him, though after the way you managed Dick Blake for Eleanor when we were sophomores, I don’t see how you expect me to succeed where you’ve failed.”
“This was so unexpected,” Betty explained. “He frightened all my ideas away, because he came at me so suddenly. I’m never any good at impromptus.”
Madeline sighed. “And that’s all I am good for. Now I may struggle over this drawer business for hours and find nothing, and then some day, when I’m not trying, I shall just put my hand out and snap the right spring. It’s horribly provoking—gives you such a lazy, purposeless feeling at times.”
Evidently Madeline didn’t care much about the disaster that threatened the Tally-ho. She could sit and play with an old-fashioned desk, not asking a question about all the matters that Betty had not taken time to write of fully, nor making a single plan for the campaign against Mr. Harrison. Well, if she believed so thoroughly in her impromptu inspirations, why should she bother with making plans? If she only would act as if she cared a little—as if she realized what the failure of the tea-room meant to Betty. But she only played with the drawers, and gave absurd accounts of the Literary Celebrations. The next one was to be a roller-skating party, and not one of the crowd had ever been on roller-skates before.
“But the first one whose story is printed is going to reimburse the rest of us for the doctors and the liniments we expect to need,” Madeline explained, “and Bob Enderby has solemnly promised to ask the editor of ‘The Leisure Hour’ to come and meet his near-contributors. It’s to-morrow night. Now say I’m not businesslike if you dare, to come straight up here and miss it all.” Then she laughed. “I may as well ’fess up that it was only the postscript about the secret drawer that brought me. But that doesn’t matter, does it? Because now that I’m here, I shall do my full duty by Mr. Harrison.”