Then Mary explained that she proposed to sell valentines. “Lots of the girls who can’t draw buy theirs, not down-town, you know–we don’t give that kind here,–but cunning little hand-made ones with pen-and-ink drawings and original verses. Haven’t you noticed the signs on the ‘For Sale’ bulletin?”
Betty had not even seen that bulletin board since she and Helen had hunted second-hand screens early in the fall, but the plan sounded very attractive; it would fill up her spare hours, and keep her from worrying over Eleanor, and getting cross at Helen, so she was very willing to help if Mary honestly thought she could draw well enough.
“Goodness, yes!” said Mary, rushing off to borrow Roberta’s water-color paper and Katherine’s rhyming dictionary.
So the partnership was formed, a huge red heart covered with hastily decorated samples was stuck up on the “For Sale” bulletin in the gymnasium basement, and, as Betty’s cupids were really very charming and her Christy heads quite as good as the average copy, names began to appear in profusion on the order-sheet.
Mary had written two sample verses with comparative ease, and in the first flush of confidence she had boldly printed on the sign: “Rhymed grinds for special persons furnished at reasonable rates.” But later, when everybody seemed to want that kind, even the valuable aid of the rhyming dictionary did not disprove the adage that poets are born, not made.
“I can’t–I just can’t do them,” wailed Mary finally. “Jokes simply will not go into rhyme. What shall we do?”
“Get Roberta–she writes beautifully–and Katherine–she told me that she’d like to help,” suggested Betty, without looking up from the chubby cupid she was fashioning.
So Katherine and Roberta were duly approached and Katherine was added to the firm. Roberta at first said she couldn’t, but finally, after exacting strict pledges of secrecy, she produced half a dozen dainty little lyrics, bidding Mary use them if she wished–they were nothing. But no amount of persuasion would induce her to do any more.
However, Katherine’s genius was nothing if not profuse, and she preferred to do “grinds,” so Mary could devote herself to sentimental effusions,–which, so she declared, did not have to have any special point and so were within her powers,–and to the business end of the project. This, in her view, consisted in perching on a centrally located window-seat in the main building, in the intervals between classes, and soliciting orders from all passers-by, to the consequent crowding of the narrow halls and the great annoyance of the serious-minded, who wished to reach their recitations promptly. But from her point of view she was strikingly successful.
“I tell you, I never appreciated how easy it is to make money if you only set about it in the right way,” she announced proudly one day at luncheon. “By the way, Betty, would you run down after gym to get our old order sheet and put up a new one? I have a special topic in psychology to-morrow, and if Professor Hinsdale really thinks I’m clever I don’t want to undeceive him too suddenly.”