The Smallest Sister nodded. “I wore my mussy old sash to that.”
“So you didn’t get quite what you wanted after all,” said Marie when Betty had decided that Dorothy might keep Marie’s presents, only Marie mustn’t do so any more. “You wanted a sash to wear to the party, and you only got one you couldn’t wear, and I’m awfully sorry about getting you into a scrape with Miss Dick. I was so busy feeling grateful that day that I never thought about anything else.”
The Smallest Sister sighed. “It’s very hard to think of everything at once, isn’t it?” she said quaintly. “Yourself and the person that’s with you and the person that’s waiting. ’Specially the person that’s waiting.”
“Very ’specially the person that’s waiting,” repeated Montana Marie O’Toole, with a burst of merriment quite unwarranted by the Smallest Sister’s argument.
Betty Wales blushed a vivid scarlet and looked suspiciously at the mirthful Marie. But Marie was quite unconscious of Betty’s indignant scrutiny. Marie was looking blissfully at nothing in particular, and the Smallest Sister was looking in amazement at Marie. Betty Wales’s blush had therefore been quite unnecessary, and as soon as she was assured of that it faded as swiftly as it had come.
CHAPTER XII
THE POPPING MASCOTS
Like every well-conducted freshman Montana Marie O’Toole took a vast interest in the basket-ball championship. Having been effectually barred from the team by her numerous entrance conditions and her even more numerous fall-term warnings, she was not disappointed, like some of her friends, when the team was chosen. Being an insuperable optimist, she cared not that the sophomore players were known as the Invincibles because they had never lost an interclass match.
When a practical-minded freshman player remarked, “Of course we can’t win, but we can play ball,” Montana Marie smiled her dazzling smile and retorted, “Don’t you give up yet. You can play ball and the rest of us can shriek—yelling is forbidden, they say, in this polite institution. And maybe—well, truth is stranger than fiction,” Montana Marie concluded with a cheerful giggle.
From this and many similar speeches the team gradually got the impression that Miss O’Toole had learned some wonderful trick-play in dear old Paree, which she was saving, to make sure that the sophomores didn’t get hold of it, until the very last days of team-practice. There was still another rumor to the effect that Montana Marie was as wonderful at basket-ball as at horseback riding, and that the faculty, out of deference to her peculiar position in college, had consented to her joining the team just before the great game, provided that her work until then was kept strictly up to the mark. But when the Invincibles lost two of their starriest stars, all because of mere low-grades in some obscure subject like elocution, the rumor that the scholarship rule was to be stretched for Marie’s benefit lost credence. But that she was to be depended upon to do something, certainly interesting and probably effective, nobody seemed to doubt. As Fluffy Dutton remarked, “She’s an awful bluffer, but somehow she always comes out on top.”
“Yes, she does,” agreed Straight, who, as head coach of the sophomore Invincibles, was peculiarly interested in Montana Marie’s proceedings, “and the reason is that nobody can get a word out of her edgewise. Maybe she has thought up a grand plan, and maybe she hasn’t an idea in her pretty head. But whichever way it is, she just smiles the same old smile. She’s a regular wizard at keeping secrets, that girl is.”