Fluffy wore a comical air of dismay. “Gracious! Doing it all alone isn’t at all my idea of a stunt. I shall be terribly scared and lonely. Straight’s got to spend the entire hour buying things of me. Oh, dear! She can’t, because it’s a cash store and we haven’t any money left. I wonder, if I should tell him I had a twin, whether he wouldn’t let her try to-day too.”
“No time,” said Georgia firmly. “Psych. 6 beckons. But you shan’t be deserted. We’ll take up a contribution for Straight to spend.”
Fluffy’s experiment in social service was the sensation of the Harding morning. Promptly at twelve she appeared, and was given the place of a wan little girl behind the ribbon counter. Ten minutes later—she had stipulated for that interval in which to learn how to “work” her cash-book—the “college trade” appeared in the persons of a lively delegation conducted by the triumphant Straight, all eagerness to display her adored twin in this new and exciting rôle. They bought ribbons recklessly, with much delicious professional encouragement from Fluffy. They smiled cheerfully upon Mr. Cannon, who lurked in the offing, watching the progress of his “new experiment” with amazed interest. Piloted by Eleanor Watson, they ascended to the doll counter, and provided themselves with souvenirs of the occasion in the shape of dancing dolls which twirled fascinatingly about a central magnet on top of a little tin box. There had been nothing so nice at the regular toy store, they declared loudly, for Mr. Cannon’s benefit. At one they escorted the weary Fluffy triumphantly to the Tally-ho for luncheon.
“He tried to hire me for all the afternoons,” explained Fluffy proudly, “and he says the rest of you may come, and Straight too, seeing she’s my twin; but no more. He doesn’t believe in trying noo experiments on too sumptoos a scale,” mimicked Fluffy joyously.
A good many things besides the easing of the lots of a few tired sales-girls came of the “noo experiment.” One was a queer friendship that sprang up between Fluffy and Mr. Cannon, cemented by a compact, on Fluffy’s part, hereafter to “trade for cash,” which Mr. Cannon considered the only honest way of living, and, on Mr. Cannon’s, to accept Mr. Thayer’s offer of rooms in the club-house where classes in embroidery and music and some amusement clubs might be enjoyed by Mr. Cannon’s girls. Then Madeline’s “Sunday Special” article on the Harding girls’ practical way of helping those less fortunate was copied and discussed through the whole country; and many women and men who had never given the matter a thought before realized that shop-girls are human and began treating them as if they were.
Meanwhile Betty Wales, seeing another application of the same principle, got together the committee on the Proper Excitement of the Idle Rich and made them a proposition.
“A store in New York wants two thousand ploshkin candle-shades before Christmas. They won’t handle less than a thousand. Six Morton Hall girls are working their heads off to get them ready in time—that means that the last shipment must go by the fifteenth. Why can’t you help them out by having some candle-shade bees?”
“I haven’t had a chance to do one thing for Christmas myself,” objected Georgia sadly.
“Do you usually make all your presents?” demanded Mary Brooks incisively. “You know you never touch one of them. As the presiding genius of the gift-shop department and the one and only Perfect Patron of the Tally-ho I am bound to help this Excitement along. It’s simply absurd for you to rush down to Cannon’s every day, and then refuse to help the girls in this very college who are just as tired and just as much tied down by this horrible Christmas tradition of buying things all in a heap, regardless of the people who have to make them then, or starve. The first bee can be at my house,” ended Mary sweetly, “and there will be perfectly good refreshments.”
The bees accomplished wonders, but it was still a struggle to finish the candle-shades in time; and when the Thorn cut her hand and the wound got poisoned and wouldn’t heal, things seemed nearly hopeless. But little Eugenia Ford came nobly to the rescue. “There’s no rule against getting up at three in the morning,” she said, and for six consecutive days she woke herself heroically at that hour, and cut, pasted, and put together candle-shades until dawn, hardly taking time for breakfast, but never neglecting her college work—she had learned her lesson about that.