The Tally-ho Tea-Shop was going to open a regular catering department. That was Betty’s “lovely new idea,” which had been her principal reason for coming back to Harding. Through the desperately busy first days of the term it had slumbered; the single-handed management of Montana Marie O’Toole had kept it in the background; the pathetic episode of the Jones sisters had delayed it still further. But when the B. C. A.’s stepped forward to share in the tutoring of Montana Marie, and when Jim Watson appeared to take Betty off on long, refreshing rides, and to remind her, by many small and tactful attentions, that at least one person in the world was tremendously interested in all her ideas and plans and achievements,—then at last did the lovely new idea for the Tally-ho get its innings. Betty took a day off from her freshman and her secretaryship, to think the whole thing over. Then she called a business meeting of “resident owners,” which was Madeline’s high-sounding name for herself and Babbie and Betty. Then she wrote to Mr. Morton, and saw to it that Babbie stopped thinking about Mr. Thayer and “the” wedding long enough to write to Mrs. Hildreth. And the next thing, since everybody heartily agreed about the splendor of the new idea, was to begin.
In this connection Betty enunciated another of her amusing business theories. “It’s easy enough to make grand and elegant plans,” she declared. “But there’s a perfectly awful gap between planning and doing. And in business it’s only the doing that counts.”
“Yes,” agreed Babbie solemnly. “Of course we want to wait until we are perfectly sure what is the very best way of starting in.”
Betty sighed despairingly. “Oh, Babbie, that’s just what I didn’t mean! I meant that the longer we think and consider and wonder how to begin, the longer,—we don’t begin,” she ended forlornly.
Madeline patted her shoulder comfortingly. “I understand, if Babbie, the lady of leisure, doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t! How can she, when she never has to make an opportunity, and then cram herself down its unwilling throat? Begin any old way, Betty. Only begin. I know the catering department will be a big success.”
And so Betty began—with Miss Raymond’s dinner. Miss Raymond had moved off the campus, and had a dear little house of her own, away up on the top of Oak Hill. Fräulein Wendt lived there with her, and a fat old French woman kept house for them—exactly as she pleased. And just as Betty was ready to open her catering establishment, a famous author from London came to Harding to deliver a lecture, and also to see Miss Raymond, whom he had met years before in England and wanted to meet again. Miss Raymond was giving a dinner for him. Celine’s cooking would do beautifully, she told Betty, coming to her to ask if Nora or Bridget knew of a waitress that she could have in for the great occasion. But Celine’s waiting and Celine’s table-laying—they would strike terror to his orderly English soul.
“I remember the dinners his sister used to give,” she went on. “Such perfect ones, with the loveliest flowers and the daintiest menu cards—you know they use menu cards over there, or they used to, where we should have place-cards—and after dinner just one lovely song or some other fascinating bit of entertainment to start the good talk going. If only I weren’t so busy! I simply can’t think of anything so frivolous as a dinner. Why couldn’t that provoking man have waited till the proofs of my new book were finished?”
Betty murmured polite sympathy, and then, when Miss Raymond had once more remembered her errand and looked suggestively at the door that led to Bridget and Nora, she bravely made the fatal plunge. Miss Raymond was a dreadful person to begin a thing on. She was hard to please. She never made allowances. She never explained what she wanted; she merely expected you to grasp her ideas with no help at all from her. But, as Madeline would have said, Miss Raymond was Opportunity knocking on the door of the Tally-ho Catering Department. A beginning was a beginning. So Betty plunged.
She explained the idea, and then timidly suggested that the new Catering Company should attempt to supply Celine’s deficiencies in the matter of decoration and service. And Miss Raymond, with a gasp of relief and a vague, “You know just the sort of charming thing I want,” fled joyously back to her neglected proofs, leaving Betty in a very perturbed, very mixed state of mind. She had got her longed-for chance to begin, but experimenting on Miss Raymond and a great English novelist certainly had its little drawbacks. Even Madeline was somewhat over-awed by the great name of the novelist, and Babbie Hildreth was frankly aghast at Betty’s daring.
“Couldn’t we have started in with a freshman spread?” she asked. “Then, after a year or so, we could work up to the grandeur of Miss Raymond. Aren’t you scared to death, Betty, for fear things will go wrong? Imagine how she’d glare at a waitress who didn’t pass things to suit her! The poor creature would probably drop her dishes and flee for her very life.”