“No, that is the second rite,” Madeline told her severely. “Come back in a week, a day, and an hour. Meditate, meanwhile, on the Rules for the Perfect Patron, and concoct at least one beautiful new feature for the tea-shop. Then, and not till then, are you permitted to touch these mystic springs. For to-day all is finished, and your long-suffering husband is waiting sadly for his tea.”
Though it was vacation time, the Tally-ho Tea-Shop found plenty of patrons. Besides Mr. Thayer, there were all the left-over girls, who, having discovered that they could have a good time if they kept together, organized breakfast and lunch parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, with skating, snow-shoeing, and sliding expeditions for appetizers between times. Betty and Eugenia had to seek the privacy of the loft for their lessons, while Madeline spread her Literary Career, in the shape of a heterogeneous litter of half-finished stories, over Betty’s desk, and good-naturedly combined the duties of cashier and manager with the toils of authorship. The best thing about a Literary Career, she confided to Mr. Thayer, when he came in one day for his tea, is that you can pursue it in any reasonably quiet corner.
“Who publishes your things?” Mr. Thayer inquired interestedly. “I must read them.”
And Madeline was forced to admit that so far she had no publishers. “But I’m going to keep on till I do,” she declared hopefully. “I could learn to paint easier, I know, because that runs in the family, but I don’t want to. I’m bound to write, and I’ll keep at it until I succeed.”
“And I’ll back you to make a big hit,” Mr. Thayer declared solemnly. “Anybody that could write those Cake songs, and that Stocking Act—— By the way, please ask the real cashier to send me a bill for my party.”
Madeline promised, and wasted the next hour considering whether she should spend her share of the December profits for a trip to Bohemia, New York, or a set of Dickens in morocco bindings. The worst thing about a Literary Career is the ease with which one’s mind wanders away from it.
Eugenia Ford cheered up a little over the Pageant of the Cakes, but when that was done with she relapsed into her former state of tearful melancholy. She was too busy to join in the fun the other girls were having, and besides, as she explained carefully to Betty, they weren’t any of them in her crowd. Betty received this statement in discreet silence. She believed in taking things one at a time, and Eugenia’s complete ignorance of the history of early English literature, her hopeless wonder at the intricacies of geometrical figures, and her perfectly appalling ideas about the principles of exposition, as exhibited in her themes, were certainly all that could be attended to in a two weeks’ vacation. Betty had been “good” in solid geometry; she could glean the main facts of the literary history from the text-book and the notes that Eugenia had thoughtfully borrowed from a friend who was a “Lit. shark”; the themes she could easily see were poor enough to secure their author a warning, but what the exact trouble was she could not tell.
“I don’t believe I could do any better myself,” Betty confided to Madeline. “Please tell me what to tell her.”
Madeline read through a few of Eugenia’s stupid little efforts, and called Betty’s attention to the marks in blue pencil at the end.
“‘No sequence of thought, no progressive logic, no relevant detail.’ That’s the trouble with them all. ‘Poor paragraphing; no development of the central idea.’ Her instructor gave her plenty of hints, but she blissfully ignored them all.”