“You wouldn’t care to come and meet her too?” Betty asked hesitatingly. “Madeline was going with me, but some girls have engaged tea here, so she’s staying to see to it.”
“I should perfectly love to,” declared Eugenia enthusiastically. “I’ll be company for you on the way down, but on the way back I’ll sit in another seat and—and do theme outlines. It’s lovely of you to ask me, Miss Wales.”
But Eugenia did no theme outlines that afternoon. The smallest sister was a very friendly little person. She flew into Betty’s arms—Will, who had brought her, was going straight to Boston on business for Cousin Joe—and having hugged and been hugged “’most to pieces” she turned to Eugenia, held up her face for a kiss, and snuggled confidingly up to her new friend while Betty went to see about the baggage, and later sat in the car with one arm around Betty and the other around Eugenia.
Eugenia smiled rapturously at Betty. “It feels so good. You see I had a little sister, Miss Wales, and she—I miss her every day of my life. May I please come and play with yours sometimes?”
Betty assured her that she might come whenever she pleased, smiling to herself as she remembered how she had meant to warn little Dorothy that girls like Eugenia Ford were too busy to bother with smallest sisters.
It seemed as if nobody was too busy to amuse Dorothy. Miss Dick’s school did not open until a week after Harding, and by that time the smallest sister had become a regular—if very restless—feature of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. Polly and Georgia and Lucile and the fluffy-haired Dutton twin had each had her to dinner on the campus, and the straight-haired twin, who was a basket-ball fiend, had secured her as mascot for the sophomore team, thereby plunging Eugenia, who took no particular interest in basket-ball and so had not thought of the freshman mascot, into the depths of woe. But no amount of flattering attention could supplant Eugenia in Dorothy’s affections. Eugenia knew how to talk to little girls. She had a way of appearing when Betty was busy and Dorothy was thinking hard of mother. Her stories were almost as nice as Madeline’s, and she was never too busy to tell one. It soon got to be a regular thing for her to slip down from the campus in the dusk of the afternoon, when Betty was always busiest in the tea-room, and it was too cold and dark for a little girl to want to play outdoors by herself. That was Dorothy’s lonesome time—or it would have been, but for Eugenia.
First Eugenia told “true stories” of dolls and canary birds that she had had when she was little, and of a tame toad that lived under the door-step at home. Then she invented the ploshkin, and after that she had to tell how to catch and kill a ploshkin every night for two weeks.
“Do you know how to catch and kill a ploshkin?” the story began, and the answer to that was an anxious “No,” even after you knew quite well, by heart, how the deed was done.
“The ploshkin is a sad little soul,” Eugenia went on solemnly, “and it lives in the middle of the bay.”
“What bay?” demanded Dorothy.