Betty watched her smilingly. “I don’t seem to be able not to spoil her,” she reflected. “But she’s just as sweet as she can be usually. And she came back of herself to tell me, and she really sent herself home, so I guess it’s all right—that is, if this new chum is a nice girl. I do hope she is.”
The Smallest Sister did not ask to be invited to supper before the appointed time, though two meals a week with Betty or Eugenia were her usual allowance, and she had grumbled and even wept before, if anything had happened to keep her away.
“Poor Francisca can’t even go to walk or down-town for two weeks. I guess I can give up one thing I like as long as that,” she told Eugenia, when that soft-hearted little person suggested intervening with Betty for a restoration of privileges. “Francisca says it’s a comfort to her to feel that somebody else has troubles.”
On the appointed evening Eugenia had a house-play rehearsal from five to six, a class officers’ meeting at quarter to seven, and a written lesson to cram for in Psych. 6. So Betty and the chums supped alone at a cunning little table by the Tally-ho’s famous fireplace. It was lighted with the “extra-special” candle-shades and there were new menu-cards with fat, rosy-faced, red-coated coachmen cracking long whips at the top, and an adorable sketch of the Peter Pan Annex growing up the left side. Bob Enderby had designed them—under protest, because he said he was much too famous to be doing menu-cards nowadays; Madeline had colored them by hand, and the Tally-ho waitress had to keep a sharp lookout to prevent their all being carried off for souvenirs. One was lost that very evening; yes, for the first time in the Tally-ho’s history, an extra-special candle-shade was missing at the close of the dinner-hour.
Francisca and Dorothy arrived late and breathless—they had been kept to tidy their rooms, Dorothy explained, but Francisca shook her head playfully at her small friend and took all the blame.
“I’m always being kept for something,” she said cheerfully. “It’s a perfect miracle that I’m here at all. If I don’t have to copy my French exercise one hundred times because I didn’t pay attention in class, I have to learn ‘Paradise Lost’ because I contradicted Kit—Miss Carson, or else I don’t pick up my nightie and—well, I’m just always in hot water, Miss Wales. It was lovely of you to ask me. Please call me Frisky—everybody does.”
Francisca was the prettiest girl—next to Eleanor Watson—that Betty had ever seen. Her eyes were soft and deep and very, very brown—like big chocolate creams. Her hair was dark and wavy, growing low down on her forehead in a widow’s peak. She puffed it out around her face in a fashion that was too old for her, but was nevertheless very becoming. Her manner was that of an older girl too—very assured and confident, but very charming. When she smiled, which she did most of the time, two big dimples showed. She lisped a little, and this gave a funny, childlike twist to her remarks, which were not at all childlike. She adopted a curious attitude of resignation toward the cruel fate that kept her always “in hot water.” She was sweetly forgiving toward those who had inflicted the two weeks’ penance just ended, and she thanked Betty for her opinion, sent by Dorothy, about little Shirley Ware. She had entirely forgiven Shirley, she said, and she meant to forget about it and hoped Shirley would do the same.
“You see,” she explained, “all the little girls love me so that I imagine they did make her pretty uncomfortable. I never meant them to, Miss Wales, but you can’t help being a favorite and having people champion your cause. Can you now?”
She made picturesquely vague references to some secret sorrow that was even worse than being in perpetual hot water at Miss Dick’s. Afterward Betty inquired about it from Dorothy.
“Oh, she’s got a stepmother,” Dorothy explained in awe-struck tones. “They don’t get along well together. Frisky says she’s very unsympathetic.” Dorothy pulled out the long word with much difficulty.