Mary shook her pretty head smilingly. “Never—for the good and sufficient reason that George Garrison Hinsdale understands me too well to give me an allowance.”
“The business of this meeting,” chanted Madeline sonorously, “is not, as you might suppose, a discussion of little Mary’s domestic and financial affairs.”
“Well, the girls asked me questions,” declared Mary indignantly, “and I didn’t know that there was any such awful rush. I’m not trying to gain time while I think up an inspiration, as you—well, I won’t start any more quarrels. I’ll only say that I’m not delaying in hopes of having an idea for Betty, because I’ve already got one. I think she ought to advertise.”
“How?”
“Why?”
“Sounds as if she was a breakfast food or a patent medicine.”
“She’s an employment bureau at present,” explained Mary serenely, “and when Morton Hall is ready to open she’ll be a house agent. She’s got to let people know that the bulletin-board in the gym basement is a back member, because she has it beaten cold. She impersonates the great and only link between the talented poor and the idle rich in this community.”
“That sounds well,” admitted Christy, “but how in the world is she to do it—be the great and only link, I mean?”
Mary shrugged her shoulders, and began putting on her gloves, which were new and fitted beautifully. “I leave all that to you,” she said. “I really must go now. Miss Ferris is having an intellectual dinner party for a philosopher from Boston, and we’re asked. I always make a point of wearing my prettiest things to their intellectual dinners—it’s the least and the most that I can do—and one’s prettiest things do take ages to get into. Good-bye, my dears.”
“She’s hit it, as usual,” said Rachel admiringly, when Mary’s trim little figure had rustled out of sight. “The important thing to do is to make the girls realize what you’re here for. Most of them know that you’re the new Student’s Aid secretary——”