“Do you remember what she was like two years ago, Betty?” asked Madeline thoughtfully when Eleanor had left them, persisting that she really had an engagement before dinner.
“I even remember what she was like three years ago,” laughed Betty happily.
“Fancy her giving up a chance like this then!” mused Madeline. “Fancy her contributing ideas to the public good and trying to escape taking the credit for them. Why, Betty, she’s a different person.”
“I’m so glad you’re friends now,” said Betty, squeezing Madeline’s arm lovingly.
“That’s so,” Madeline reflected. “We weren’t two years ago. I used to hate her wire-pulling so. And now I suppose I’m pulling wires for her myself. Well, I’m going to be careful not to pull any of them down on her head this time. I say, Betty, wouldn’t the Blunderbuss make a superb jack-in-the-box? I’m sure everybody would appreciate the symbolic effect when she popped, and perhaps we could manage to smother her by mistake between times.”
The toy-shop took “like hot-cakes,” to borrow Bob’s pet comparison. Everybody told Madeline that it was just like her, and Madeline assured everybody gaily that she had always known she was misunderstood and that anyhow Eleanor Watson was responsible for the toy-shop. Having spent the better part of a day in spreading this information Madeline rushed off to New York on a vague and mysterious errand that had something to do with sub-letting the apartment on Washington Square.
“I remembered after I got down here,” she wrote Betty a week later, “that I couldn’t eat my solitary Christmas dinner in the flat if I let it. Besides my prospective tenants are bores, and bores never appreciate old furniture enough not to scratch it. But I’m staying on to oversee the fall cleaning, and we haven’t had one for a good while, so it will take another week. I’m sorry not to be on hand for the toy-shop doings (don’t you let them put it off, Betty, or I can never make up my work), but I send a dialogue—no, it’s for four persons—on local issues for the Punch and Judy puppets. If they can’t read it, tell them to cultivate their imaginations. I’ll print the title, ‘The Battle of the Classes,’ to give them a starter.
“Miss me a little,
”Madeline.
“P. S. How are the wires working?”