Miss Dwight laughed heartily at the absurd question. “Sit down, my dear,” she said, not seeming to mind the unwarranted invasion of her privacy. “Are you one of these astonishing Harding girls?”
“No, I’m only at school,” explained Frisky calmly, “but I’m as old as some college girls. And anyway, isn’t it better to begin acting when you’re very young?”
Miss Dwight stared at her, a sombre shadow in her great dark eyes. “You’re far too pretty to begin young,” she said. “Some day, if you really want it, and your mother is willing——”
“I’ve only a stepmother,” put in Frisky airily, “so I needn’t consider that.”
Miss Dwight looked at her again. “It’s a hard life, my dear—a long pull, and very little besides more hard work for you if you win, and if you never do make good—and most of us don’t——”
“Oh, please don’t discourage me,” Frisky broke in impulsively. “It’s the one thing in life for me.”
“Wait till you have some idea about life before you say that,” Miss Dwight advised her rather sharply. “Make friends with your stepmother, to begin with. If you can do that now, perhaps some day you can make friends with an audience. Go back to school and study hard. Read the great plays and the great poems. And in five years, if you’re still stage-struck, come to me—and I’ll give you some more good advice. Good-bye, my dear.” She held out her hand with a definite gesture of dismissal that even Frisky could not ignore.
“Good-bye, and thank you,” said the girl, “but five years is an awfully long time to wait, Miss Dwight. You may see me sooner.”
With which parting shot, Frisky returned to her horrified friends more stage-struck than ever, and more confident of her ability to manage any situation to her liking. Her vanity would have received a severe shock if she had heard Miss Dwight call her a silly child, Madeline emphasize the fact that Frisky wasn’t a college girl, or a type of even the shallowest variety, and Betty confide to Mary Brooks Hinsdale that she was thoroughly ashamed of the Smallest Sister’s new chum.
The next morning Frisky sent Miss Dwight a bunch of violets and a gushing note, which her divinity refused to read because “the handwriting made her nervous.” But there was also a note from Helena Mason, enclosing a little verse which she asked permission to print in the next “Argus.” Miss Dwight laughed and cried over it, declared it was the best thing that had ever been written about her, and made Madeline take her at once to see the author, who gushed, in conversation, as badly as Frisky had on paper, and seemed to have the vaguest possible ideas about Miss Dwight’s genius, which she had described so aptly in her poetical mood.