When Binks had gone, Georgia lay back on her broad window-seat and chuckled. “She’s all right, is my peculiar cousin,” Georgia reflected. “Jists and Suffragists will drag her into Dramatic Club without any help from me. And she doesn’t know it. She wouldn’t care if she did know it. And I almost let Clio Club get her, just because she was in the family and so I never appreciated her! Well, I appreciate her now. I guess I’ll go and find Betty and get her to come with me to see Miss Ferris about the extra-special show.”
Never in the whole history of Harding College had there been a more successful affair than Binks’s altogether impromptu, go-as-you-please Benefit Performance. Binks’s method of arranging the various stunts was quite simple.
“Is your mother a club-woman?” she demanded of each prospective head of a committee. “Well, is she a fresh-air fiend? Or a Suffragette? Or does she go in hard for exercise? She does? Then won’t you please be Georgia’s right-hand man on her committee? Georgia is getting up some killing kind of a dance, to make fun of the exercise business.
“Now, Susanna, you were brought up on fresh air, and you can write songs. Write one for a chorus of fresh-air-brought-up children, won’t you? You can choose your own chorus to sing the song, and consult with them about costumes and all that sort of thing.”
It worked like a charm, Binks’s method.
“You see,” Fluffy explained it, “a clever girl is sure to have a clever mother, and nowadays all clever mothers have fads. Ours has the no-breakfast fad. Straight is trying to write a one-act tragedy entitled, ‘Before Breakfast, Never After.’ It will be tragic all right if it goes the way I felt the summer that I obligingly tried to join the anti-breakfast crusade.” Fluffy, who was engaged at the moment in eating a particularly hearty breakfast at the Tally-ho, returned happily to her second order of waffles.
Of course the B. C. A.’s heard about the extra-special show, and Madeline, who was still in Harding celebrating the acceptance of her novel, could not resist the lure of a project so congenial. She wrote Binks a modest little note offering to write a one-act farce entitled, “Waiting Dinner for Mother; or, The Meal-Hour and the Artistic Temperament.”
“It will be founded on my personal observations,” Madeline wrote, “and maybe it will be amusing, because living in Bohemia New York used to be very amusing indeed, in spite of too much artistic temperament getting into the cooking. I think our post-graduate crowd would act it out for me, and then I shouldn’t be making you any bother.”
“Bother!” repeated Binks, reading the note, which she had just picked off the bulletin-board, aloud to a circle of friends. “Bother! She’s written a play for Agatha Dwight—a really-truly play that you sit in two dollar seats to see. And she hopes it won’t be a bother if she writes one for this show!” Binks, who was not yet a recognized celebrity, nevertheless leaned against the sacred note-room table, quite overcome by the splendor of Madeline’s offer.