“When you said ‘him’ you were only trying to speak good English? Well, isn’t ‘her’ as good English as ‘him’?”
“You might as well own up to him right off and save yourself a lot of trouble. Detective Ayres will shadow you till you confess.”
But Helen displayed a hitherto unsuspected talent for clever sparring. “It’s just like you girls to make a lot out of a little,” she declared, so earnestly that everybody saw she meant it. “That’s why we have such good times,—because you make all the stupid little things in life seem interesting.”
“Well, don’t dare to deny that you’re a stupid little thing,” Mary told her, with an appreciative pat to emphasize that she was only joking. “And please be duly thankful that we can make even you seem interesting.”
“Oh, I am grateful,” Helen told her, with pretty seriousness. “But you ought to keep within the probabilities, and you ought to have more variety about your inventions. We’ve got romances enough on hand, without making up one for me.”
“The business of this meeting——” began Mary again at last, pounding hard on the table with one of the fascinating fat mustard jars which Madeline had summarily bought in London to start the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. “The business of this meeting——”
“Is just coming in at the door,” Rachel Morrison laughingly finished Mary’s sentence for her.
And sure enough, Betty Wales, looking very young, very pretty, also very care-free and happy for a person in dire need of rescue, was shutting the door with one hand, giving Emily Davis a handful of letters and memoranda with the other, and telling Nora about a special dinner order for that evening as she slipped off her ulster. Then she made a bee-line for Jack o’ Hearts’ stall and the Merry Hearts.
“Let me in—way in, please,” she begged, scrambling past Babbie, Helen, and Mary to the most secluded seat at the back of the stall. “I came after all, because I wanted some fun, and I won’t be dragged out to talk to anybody about dinners they want me to plan, or Student’s Aid things, or Morton Hall things—or even a conditioned freshman,” she concluded with a particularly vindictive emphasis on the last phrase.
“Hear! Hear!” cried Christy Mason.