“I should think so.” Betty jumped up in dismay. “I appear to have the evening before me, but really I’ve promised to take dinner with Mr. Morton.”
“Who-can’t-be-kept-waiting,” chanted Jim, giving her a hand up the steep bank.
Betty stayed in Harding two days, during which she had many long talks with Emily about the secretaryship and its possibilities. Being, as she picturesquely put it, a Morton Hall girl born too soon, Emily could speak from experience, and she suggested all sorts of things that Betty would never have thought of.
“But that’s all I can do,” she told Betty, when that modest little person declared that Emily, and not she, was surely the ideal secretary. “I can explain what ought to be done, but I couldn’t do it. It takes a person with bushels of tact to manage those girls. Maybe you aren’t as good at planning as Rachel or I. That’s nothing. You’ve got the bushels of tact. That’s the unique quality that the directors had the sense to see was indispensable. You’re ‘elected’ to accept, Betty dear, so you might just as well telegraph for your trunks.”
But Betty did nothing quite so summary. She wanted to talk things over with the family, who would be sorely disappointed, she knew, if she decided to come back to Harding, after she had hinted that perhaps the Tally-ho could go on with only flitting visits from its Head Manager. Besides, there was no use in losing the rest of August at Lakeside, and the Smallest Sister would grieve bitterly if the ritherum broke its promise to come home soon and play. Betty resolved to have Dorothy back again in Miss Dick’s school. There were lonely times and discouraged times ahead of her, she knew, and if a little sister is a responsibility, she is much more of a comfort. Mother would have Will and father, and if father went South again she would want to go too, so it wouldn’t be selfish to ask for Dorothy, if——
But in her secret soul, Betty knew that the “if” was a very, very small one. Father and mother would tell her to do what she felt was best, and she had no doubt about her final decision. She almost owed it to Mr. Morton to do anything she could toward making his splendid gift to Harding as useful as possible, and if Prexy and the directors and Emily were right she could do a great deal.
“And isn’t it splendid,” she reflected, “that when I’ve got less money than ever I can do more? That proves that money isn’t everything—it isn’t anything unless you are big enough to make it something. Oh, dear! What if I shouldn’t ‘make good,’ as Will says? Why, I’ve just got to!”
Betty set her lips again and walked down the platform of the Cleveland station with her head so high that she almost ran into Will, who had come to meet her.
“Get along all right?” he demanded briskly.
“All right so far,” Betty told him, “but there’s more ahead, and it’s fifty times bigger than anything I’ve tried before.”