“To have people think you’re not honest!” reflected Georgia. “I remember something about that from my freshman year. It’s pretty bad. But to know yourself that you haven’t been honest—that must be just perfectly dreadful. Poor thing! In a way it was all right, too. That makes it even harder. And it’s abominably hard not to have any of the things that most girls have here so much too much of. Why, that squint of hers is enough to make her think crooked, and be discontented with life! And if the sister is so done up that she has to leave, then the dishonesty will have been all for nothing. Poor Betty! She won’t think I’m much of a rescuer when I dump this bundle of bothers into her nice, comfortable lap.”
CHAPTER VIII
JISTS AND SUFFRAGISTS
“You can get a thing off your mind easily enough by telling it to somebody,” said little Binks Ames very soberly. “But it isn’t so easy to get it off your heart. I don’t know how to begin, and I hate to bother you and Miss Wales any more, Georgia, but something has simply got to be done for that poor freshman Jones.”
“Didn’t your mother know of any free sanitorium?” demanded Georgia.
Binks shook her head. “It costs seven dollars a week at the one she ought to go to, and she’d probably have to stay a year. Seven times two is fourteen and seven times five is—— Oh, dear, I can’t do it in my head!”
“Three sixty-four,” computed Georgia rapidly. “More than it would probably cost her to stay on here for a year. And that was more than she’s got. Can’t she get well at home?”
“Maybe,” said Binks absently, “but she’s a lot surer to at the sanitorium. Georgia, you remember the day you asked me for tea at the Tally-ho? It was full, and everybody seemed to be having a good deal to eat. Your bill for six—I couldn’t help seeing it—was two dollars and ten cents.”
“It was,” said Georgia, “and I had to borrow the ten cents of Fluffy Dutton. Why will you unkindly recall that embarrassing incident, Binks?”
Binks smiled politely at Georgia’s little joke. “I was just thinking—if that tea-shop is full every afternoon, and each girl spends thirty or forty cents for tea and cakes, why, in a week they must pay out nearly three hundred dollars.”
“Easily,” agreed Georgia. “And incidentally they ruin their digestions and their appetites for campus dinners, and we have to eat warmed-up left-overs for next day’s lunch. But Betty Wales and her tea-shop flourish, and everybody is happy.”