Cousin Joe chuckled. “You always have some good reason for wanting to sit in front, young lady,” he said. “When you were a kid, you had to be where you could cluck to the horses. But I certainly didn’t suppose you went in for moonlight and fairies and that sort of thing. I thought you were a hard-headed business woman, with all kinds of remarkable money-making schemes up your sleeves.”
Betty patted the embroidery on her cuff and frowned disapprovingly at him. “You shouldn’t make fun of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, Cousin Joe. It does make money—really and truly it does.”
“Well, I guess I know that,” Cousin Joe assured her solemnly, “and I understand the extremely marketable nature of ploshkins. Will keeps me very well posted about his wonderful sister’s wonderful enterprises that are backed by the Morton millions.”
“Don’t be silly, please, Cousin Joe,” begged Betty. “I’ve just done what any girl would have under the circumstances, and I’ve had such very scrumptious luck—that’s all.”
Cousin Joe put on slow speed, and leaned forward to stare at Betty in the moonlight. “You’ve pulled off a start that any man might envy you, little girl, and you’re just as pretty and young and jolly as if you’d never touched money except to spend it for clothes and candy. And you still love fun and look out for fairies, and some day a nice young man—I say, Betty, here’s a long straight stretch. Change seats and see how fast you can tool her up to the Pine Grove Country Club for a cool little supper all around.”
“Oh, could I truly try?”
Betty’s voice sounded like a happy child’s, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure and excitement, as her small hands clutched the big wheel.
Cousin Joe leaned back and watched her. “I had a tough pull when I started out in life,” he was thinking, “and no ‘such very scrumptious luck,’ either, and I let it sour me. Betty’s game, luck or no luck. Luck’s not the word for it, anyway. Of course people want to keep friends with the girl who owns that smile. It means something, her smile does. It’s not in the same class with Miss Mary Hooper’s society smirk. I can’t see myself why that nice young man that I almost said was going to fall in love with her some day doesn’t come along—several of him in fact. But I’m glad I didn’t finish that sentence; I suppose you could spoil even Betty Wales.”
Betty remembered her letter again when she stepped on it in the dark and it crackled. She had undressed by moonlight, so as not to wake little Dorothy, who shared her room at the cottage. Now she lit a candle, and opening her letter read it in the dim flickering light. Something dropped out—a long slip that proved, upon further examination, to be a railroad ticket from Cleveland to Harding and back again. And the typewritten letter—that might have been “only an old circular”—was signed by no less a personage than the President of Harding College himself. Seeing his name at the end, in the queer scraggly hand that every Harding girl knew, quite took Betty’s breath away, and as for the letter itself! When she had finished it Betty blew out the candle and sank down in an awe-stricken little heap on the floor by the window to think things over and straighten them out.
Prexy had written to her himself—the great Prexy! He wanted her to come and advise with him and Mr. Morton and the architects about the finishing touches for Morton Hall. Of all absurd, unaccountable ideas that was the queerest.