“Well, you’re the only one I ever do burst out to,” Betty assured him, “except when I decide that it’s only right to ask Miss Ferris or Prexy or some responsible person like them for advice. I don’t know why I should talk so much more about it to you, except that you don’t know any of the girls and never will, whereas Madeline would be sure to write up anything funny that she heard, and Rachel and Christy and Helen are on the faculty and the girls who come to see me might be in their classes, and if Emily Davis knew she’d want terribly to tell the rest.”
“All girls are leaky,” Jim would announce sententiously at this point in the argument. “Besides, I’ve been a secretary myself. My job was exactly the same as yours in the matter of holding confidential information. Now when are you coming over to see about that linen closet?”
It was really not at all surprising, considering how highly Jasper J. Morton valued her opinion, that his architectural representative found it necessary to consult Betty Wales almost every day on some problem growing out of the peculiar adaptabilities and arrangements of Morton Hall.
The B. C. A.’s paced the station platform till they were tired, and then they further outraged the dignity of the “faculty and wives” by sitting down to rest on a baggage truck, and swinging their feet off the edge. It was thus that Jim, who had taken the precaution to telephone the ticket agent before leaving home, found them a few minutes before Eleanor’s arrival.
“Do make yourselves as fascinating as you can,” he implored them all naïvely, “so she’ll stay. She’s been taking singing lessons lately at home, and her teacher had a New York teacher visiting her, and both of them got excited about Eleanor’s voice. So now she’s written about some crazy plan she has for a winter in New York, studying music. That’s all right after Christmas, maybe, but at present I want her right here, and the person who can make her see it that way wins my everlasting gratitude.”
SITTING DOWN TO REST ON A BAGGAGE TRUCK
“You’ll be likely to win your own everlasting gratitude, I should say,” Madeline told him. “Eleanor was always expatiating on the charms of her brother Jim.”
Jim blushed. “That’s all right, but I have a feeling that she’s keener about some other fellow’s charms by this time. Plenty of fellows are certainly keen about hers. But lately she doesn’t pay any attention to them—just goes in for slumming and improving her mind, and now her voice. So give her a good time, and get her excited about your mysterious club, and when she begins on the earnestness of life and the self-improvement business, ring in all Miss Betty’s philanthropies. And I’ll come in strong on the lonely brother act. I say, there she is this minute!”