“Come on, Betty, and give us the rest of it while we’re waiting,” coaxed Lucile, pulling Betty toward Eugenia. “She’s been telling us how Babe the man-hater fell in love. It’s a joyous tale. You met Babe, Eugenia, when she was up this fall—and you’ve met Betty Wales, of course.”
Eugenia looked gravely at Betty. “Yes, I believe I’ve met Miss Wales,” she said.
“Of course, at my gargoyle party,” put in Georgia. “Go on, Betty, about that fascinating Paris pension, and their rubbering out into the garden and planning to have breakfast together every morning.”
Betty, watching Eugenia, shook her head, with a brave little smile. “Some other time. I’m busy now. That is, I can’t desert my post to play with you, as I’ve told you all sixty times before.”
“Shall we go and sit down?” asked Eugenia again, sweetly. And as they filed off, her clear high voice came back distinctly to Betty. “I didn’t ask her to come,” she was explaining to Georgia, “because I think it’s much better not to mix business and society, don’t you, Miss Ames? Of course if I saw her up on the campus I should be nice to her. But here it’s rather awkward, because some of my friends would think it was awfully funny to be introduced to the cashier.”
Betty couldn’t hear Georgia’s low, emphatic retort, but she could guess at its tenor, and later, when Polly Eastman leaned around the edge of the stall, wearing her widest, most provoking smile, and waved her handkerchief, she could imagine how she and Lucile and the Dutton twins were making poor Eugenia’s life a burden to her by those subtle methods of persecution that had won the trio their reputation for being the best friends and the worst enemies that a Harding girl could have. It was four to one, and Betty pitied poor Eugenia, who felt the hostile atmosphere—without in the least understanding what it meant, and spent the afternoon writing a tearful letter to her boarding-school chum, all about the hatefulness of Harding upper-class girls who were “too sweet for anything” one minute and “perfectly horrid” the next. She thought she would leave at Christmas time, she wrote, even if her father had said she couldn’t keep changing her mind. Then she made out a check to the Tally-ho Tea-Shop for her luncheon and mailed it, with a disagreeable little note, complaining of the waitress’s awkwardness and too much pepper in the soup. “The table wasn’t decently laid, either, and the flowers were a mess,” she concluded, and addressed the note to “Miss Welch.”
“That’s what Georgia Ames gets back for calling me an idiotic little snob,” muttered Eugenia, as she posted her letters.
Eugenia’s note, which Betty couldn’t find time to read until late the next afternoon, was the last straw in the load of a very hard day. The week before, business had been so dull that Betty had reluctantly decided to dispense with two of the Students’ Aid waitresses, and, having tried to choose the ones who could best do without the money, she had screwed up her courage and explained the situation. They had both cried, and now, the very day after they were gone, the Tally-ho Tea-Shop was crowded to overflowing, and poor Nora and her one remaining assistant fairly ran back and forth between the kitchen and the stalls in their efforts not to keep impatient customers waiting. Then everybody had been seized with a mad desire for English muffins just on the very day when Bridget had decided only to make up a few, and the sandwiches that there never had been enough of before were all left over. Several people had complained that they could never get what they ordered, and some had gone away. Betty stood it until five o’clock, and then, confiding to the Students’ Aid waitress that she felt as if she should fly, she left her in charge and went up to see Miss Ferris.
“What’s the trouble now, little girl?” demanded Miss Ferris, when she had established Betty in a big easy chair by the open fire, with a box of chocolates at her elbow.
“Nothing,” said Betty bravely, “or at least there oughtn’t to be anything. What would you do, Miss Ferris, if things that you knew oughtn’t to bother you, bothered you awfully all the same?”