“I’m going to spend October with Madeline. Mother is off paying visits, so I can get away easily. Be sure to come right away, because we ought to get the tea-room started at once. Mother says I may do just as I like about it, only of course I know that I can’t stay away from her all the time. When she says I can do as I like she really means that I may have all the money I want.
“Betty dear, if you really want to earn some money, why couldn’t you run the tea-room? Madeline will be too busy with her writing. Besides, she hates running things. I should love it, only there’s mother to be amused.
“Babe is too wrapped up in her beloved John to answer any letters. Bob is trying to make her father start a newsboys’ home, and he says perhaps he will if he can have his own home back again. Bob has some little ragamuffin or other up there all the time. I prefer tea-rooms myself to newsboys’ homes or fiancés.
“Babbie.”
“P. S. Jack and I have had a dreadful quarrel. He was the one who came to see me off, you know, and I never, never dreamed we could change our minds. But all is over between us. Please never mention his name to me again.
“P. S. Do you think we should have the tea-room in New York or Harding?”
This letter Betty read and reread, and finally put away in her writing-desk without so much as mentioning it to any one. But that afternoon she went all by herself to have afternoon tea at an attractive little shop that had just been opened down-town. She read the menu carefully, and finally asked the waitress if she might take it away with her. She counted the tables, the waitresses, and the patrons. She scanned the decorations with a critical eye. She frowned when she noticed that there were three different kinds of china in the tea service that the maid had brought her. Then she sat for a long while, sipping her tea and trying to remember little details of the fascinating Glasgow tea-rooms, and of the Oxford Street and Piccadilly shops that the B. A.’s abroad had haunted so persistently in the pursuit of Madeline’s “dominant interest.” Finally she tried to compare the prices on the cards with those at Cuyler’s and Holmes’s in Harding. And last of all, she extracted a tiny silver pencil from her shopping-bag, and put down a few figures on the back of the menu. But she soon gave up that. Hadn’t she just discovered that figures lie? And besides, when you can’t even guess at rents, and haven’t the least idea how much chairs and tables and china cost, and are even a little uncertain about waitress’s wages, the calculating of the probable expenses per month of running a tea-room becomes, to say the least, a difficult matter.
At last, having remembered her responsibilities about dinner, Betty rushed home and into her big apron—she had half a dozen big ones now—as fast as possible. She was very quiet during dinner, but afterward, as soon as she had helped Maggie clear the table, she put out the lights, walked into the library, and made an astonishing announcement.
“Father dear, if you’re willing and mother can get another cook and you won’t all miss me too much, I want to go to New York next week to see about running a tea-room for Babbie Hildreth. We haven’t decided yet whether to have it there or in Harding, but Babbie thinks I could run it, and I think so too.”
“Why, Betty, don’t be absurd!”