“In August,” Babbie admitted sulkily, “if you must know. My Aunt Belinda brought me up in her car.” She brightened in spite of herself. “Aunt Belinda is so lovely and romantic. She thinks it’s all right for me to come up and see Robert, since he can’t come very often to see me. Mother doesn’t, exactly. But she was terribly amused at this B. C. A. cult. She told me to run along and satisfy my ‘satiable curiosity’ if I wanted to. I—oh, excuse me one minute, please!”
Having thoughtfully secured a seat at the end of the stall, Babbie had been the first to observe a dark object in the act of vaulting the Tally-ho’s back fence. She intercepted the dark object on the front walk, and accompanied it forthwith to Paradise, where the tea and marmalade that you hunger for and the curiosity that you feel about mysterious “cults” may both, under favorable circumstances, be forgotten as utterly as if they had never been.
So the B. C. A.’s amused themselves by inventing some stunning “features” for a formal initiation ceremony to be held later for Eleanor and Babbie together, ate Babbie’s share of the muffins and jam, congratulated themselves on the way they had “set Betty up in business,” as Mary Brooks modestly put it, and waited so long for their beloved “Object” to appear—it was an office-hours afternoon, and Betty had refused to desert her post even for a B. C. A. tea-drinking—that they had to run all the way to the station, only to discover, on arriving there breathless and disheveled, that the train was an hour late.
“So we might just as well have preserved the dignity of the Harding faculty and wives,” sighed Mary, straightening her new fall hat. “It’s all your fault, Betty Wales. You said you’d come in time to go to the train, and we kept thinking you’d arrive upon the scene every single minute. And the longer we waited the more we ate, and then the harder it was to run.”
“Some one came in to see me just at the last minute,” Betty explained. “I couldn’t say that I had an engagement when it was just larks.”
Betty let the cult and its friends get all the orders they would for skirt braids and gym suits, and all possible data about needy girls; but she never confided in them, in return—a conservative attitude which Madeline considered “distinctly snippy.”
“I just know you’re concealing all sorts of stunning short stories about your person,” she declared. “Now Bob tells me lovely things about her fresh-air kids. She isn’t such a clam.”
But Betty was equally impervious to being called a clam and to fulfilling her obligations toward Madeline’s Literary Career. The humor and the pathos that came into the secretary’s office she regarded as state secrets, to be never so much as hinted at, even to her dearest friends.
“But it sometimes seems as if I should just burst with it all,” she told Jim Watson, who poked his head in her door nearly every day, and rapidly withdrew it again if any one else was with her. “It isn’t only the girls who come on regular business that are so queer, but the ones that come just for advice. Eugenia Ford has the strangest ideas about my being able to straighten things out, and she’s told her crowd, and they’ve told their friends. Every day some girl walks in and says, ‘Are you the one who will answer questions?’ Then I say who I am, and suggest that maybe she wants her class officer. But she says no, she means me; and maybe she’s a freshman who has decided that she can’t live another day without her collie dog, and maybe she’s a senior, who has cut too much and is frightened silly about being sent home, and maybe she’s a pretty, muddle-headed little sophomore who’s in love with a Winsted man and doesn’t dare tell her father and mother, and is thinking of eloping. Oh, Jim, these are just possible cases, you understand, not real ones. But you mustn’t ever breathe a word of what I’ve said.”
“I’m as silent as a tomb,” Jim would assure her gravely each time that something too nearly “real” slipped out.