“The view will be perfectly lovely from the top,” declared Babbie. “And isn’t it fine that our trees are in such a sheltered place, behind the little white house?”
Betty nodded. “If Bob were here she’d shin up to the top this very minute and tell us what you can see.”
“But Babe will surely say she likes the second story best, because she and John made up their quarrel in the second story,” laughed Babbie; and then they settled down to telling the bewildered Mary about the house-in-the-trees café that they had discovered near Paris, and how the going-away party held there for Madeline had developed into an announcement party for Babe. And of course Mary agreed that a Peter Pan Annex was the only thing for the Tally-ho Tea-Shop.
“And as Madeline won’t let me call my night-school a branch of the business, I shall write her how I thought up this,” Babbie declared. “I will also hunt up that comical carpenter that Madeline had such times with last fall, and show him how to build it.”
Now carpentry and the supervision of carpentry are no work for a woman; and the Tally-ho’s trees were in plain sight from Mr. Thayer’s office windows. So it was only natural, when Babbie’s slender figure appeared on the lawn for the purpose of supervision, that Mr. Thayer should join her for the purpose of applying an understanding masculine intelligence and a firm masculine will to the direction of the thickest-headed carpenter imaginable. Babbie had a careless fashion of running out on the rawest day without a wrap. This made it all the more necessary for Mr. Thayer to come over, bringing his sweater to throw across her shoulders.
“I saw your Cousin Austin at Palm Beach,” Babbie had explained shortly after her arrival in Harding, “and then at St. Augustine. At Miami he took us on the loveliest cruise, and I drove his car at sixty miles an hour on the beach at Ormond. It was ripping fun. Not many men will risk your losing your head and smashing them up.”
“And don’t you ever lose your head?” inquired Mr. Thayer blandly.
“Not over your Cousin Austin,” said Babbie, with a flash of a smile.
After that Mr. Thayer came oftener and stayed longer. Babbie assured Betty and Emily Davis that they had no idea how complicated a Peter Pan Annex seemed to an untraveled carpenter of Harding.
“We’re so afraid it won’t have the real French air,” she said. “That’s why we spend such ages in staring at it from all possible angles.”