Lucile and Polly and the Dutton twins happened to be breakfasting at the Tally-ho when it came, and Betty passed it over to them for opinions about its probable meaning.
“With her usual Bohemian extravagance she pays for seven words that she doesn’t send,” complained Lucile. “Let’s answer it, girls. What shall we say?”
“Which way were you going?” suggested Fluffy Dutton. “That’s to the point. And send it ‘C. O. D.’ Then she’ll be more explicit next time.”
“Not she,” objected Polly. “The charm of her is that she doesn’t know the meaning of explicitness. But we’ll send it ‘C. O. D.’ all the same, because we are all too poor to pay.”
Polly had not anticipated Madeline’s obvious revenge, which was to send a ninety word reply, unpaid, and addressed to “Lucile-Polly-Fluffy-Georgia, Belden House.” But she was quick to see her way out of the financial difficulty.
“Georgia didn’t do anything about sending it, so she pays,” she decreed; and Georgia accepted the decision with her customary bland cheerfulness, only demanding in return the ownership of the telegram, which would make a beautiful trophy for her “memorabil,” as the Harding girl calls her scrap-book filled with souvenirs of her college days.
The telegram was certainly a work of art and ingenuity, and it took art and ingenuity to understand it, with no punctuation marks and some words evidently invented by a despairing operator in a quandary over Madeline’s perfectly illegible handwriting. But the general drift was that Madeline had been “on the way to” utter despair,—because the heroine of her novel insisted on eloping with the villain instead of the hero—when she thought of making a story out of Patricia’s long-lost letters from “R.” While she was waiting for her effort to come back to her, as usual, she scribbled off a college tale about a girl who had a desk with a secret drawer and didn’t know it. The first story was accepted—and paid for—by the magazine that had been the goal of her ambitions all winter, and the other had brought her a contract for a dozen college stories to be written within a year, on terms that made a true Bohemian like Madeline feel fairly dizzy with sudden wealth.
This splendid sequel to the hunt for Eugenia’s theme reminded Betty of the papers which had filled her drawer, and which, in the rush of other excitements, she had quite forgotten. If they had anything to do with Patricia and “R.” perhaps Madeline might write a sequel to her first story and score another triumph. But examination proved that the nearest name to Patricia mentioned in them was prosaic Peter, and the only “R.” a Robert Wales who signed one of the papers in the minor rôle of witness for Peter’s signature. Betty was interested at discovering her surname; but prosy old documents make dull reading, even if witnessed by a possible ancestor. However, she finally sent them to Madeline, for, as she told Georgia Ames, you never can tell what a literary person will see in the most commonplace things.
Of course Madeline was overjoyed at the happy outcome of the Tally-ho’s crisis, and so was Babbie, who appeared in Harding with the very earliest signs of spring.
“Florida was duller than ever this year,” she told Betty. “I’ve left mother in Washington waiting for really warm weather, and I’ve come to see about my branch of the Tally-ho. I’m sure it needs my personal attention. Mr. Thayer certainly ought to give the poor stocking-makers ice-cream for staying in and learning their lessons now that it’s getting to be nice weather. You’re not a bit enterprising about working up business through the night-school, Betty.”