Christabel Porter was a lanky, spectacled senior with a marvelous memory, a passion for scientific research, a deep hatred of persons who misnamed helpless infants, and a whole-hearted contempt for the frivolity of the Dutton twins and their tribe. She respected Georgia, making an exception of her because she always wore her hair plain and never indulged in any kind of feminine furbelows.
“No use,” objected Fluffy. “Let’s go along to dinner so we can get through and begin on Rosa Marie’s clothes.”
“We’ve got all night,” said Georgia easily, “if we need it. Let’s have a try at the impossible. Hello, Christabel. Have you been buying one too?”
Christabel squinted near-sightedly at the trio. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What on earth are you doing up here on those cold steps, when it’s past six already?”
“Talking to you,” Fluffy told her sweetly, holding the Esquimaux up against the western light and smoothing the baby’s skirts ostentatiously.
Christabel squinted harder. “Dolls!” she scoffed at last. “What on earth are you up to now?”
“Georgia’s is the biggest,” said Straight sulkily. “Tell her about the C. I.’s, Georgia. You were the one that thought of it. It’s nothing to blame us about.”
Christabel listened to the tale in bewildered silence. At the conclusion she gave a deep sigh. “Count me in,” she said. “I’m thinking of taking a Ph. D. in psychology at Zurich next winter. I guess this is as good an experiment on the play instinct as I’m likely to run up against.” She sighed again deeply. “Of all the queer unaccountable reactions! If it was after midyears, perhaps I could understand it, but now—— Don’t tell any one else that I’m studying it, please; they wouldn’t be quite natural if they knew. Where do you buy dolls?”
That evening the Belden House was in a flutter of excitement. The Dutton twins were in Georgia’s room with the door locked. Fluffy’s dolls were reposing on her bed, carefully pillowed on two lace-edged sachets. The doll’s house was delivered about eight o’clock, and most of the paper was torn off it in some way or other before Fluffy saw it. Georgia sternly refused to open the door to any one. The sound of cheerful conversation, laughter, and little squeals of pleasurable excitement floated out over the transom. Plainly the Dutton twins and Georgia Ames were not studying Logic—or they were studying it after peculiar methods of their own. Furthermore, Fluffy’s note-book was lying conspicuously on her table, and Barbara West had borrowed Georgia’s, and was almost in tears over its owner’s curt refusal to come out and explain what Barbara angrily described as “two pages of hen scratches about undistributed middle, and that was just what I didn’t get!”
When the quarter to ten warning-bell jangled through the Belden House halls, Georgia threw her room hospitably open. With magic celerity it filled up with curious girls, who stared in amazement at the spectacle of Straight Dutton rocking a huge doll to sleep, laughed at Wooden’s mussy wig and checked gingham apron—“Exactly like the ones I used to have to wear,” Georgia explained pathetically, “and the other girls laughed at me just that way”—and noisily demanded explanations of the absurd trio’s latest eccentricity. Next morning alarm clocks went off extra early, Main Street swarmed with Belden House girls on a before-chapel quest for dolls, the toy-shop proprietor telegraphed a hurry order to the nearest doll factory, and surreptitious examination of queer, hunchy bundles broke the tension of the Logic quiz and blocked the hallways between classes.