“I DO CARE ABOUT HAVING FRIENDS LIKE YOU,” SHE SAID.
Betty’s pleasure in this unexpected honor was rather dampened by the fact that Jean Eastman had proposed her name, making it seem almost as if she were taking sides with Eleanor’s enemies. But Madeline only laughed at what she called Jean’s neat little scheme for getting the last word.
“Ruth Ford was all ready to nominate you,” she said, “but Jean dashed in ahead of her. She wanted to assure me that I hadn’t silenced her for long.”
So Betty gave herself up to the happy feeling of having shown herself worthy to be trusted with part of 19—’s most momentous undertaking.
“I must write Nan to-night,” she said, “but I don’t think I shall mention the costume part. She would think I was just as frivolous as ever, and Barbara says that all the committee are expected to help with things in general.”
Whereupon she remembered her tea-drinking, and hurried home to find most of the guests already assembled, and Eleanor, who had not gone to the class meeting but who had heard all about it from the others, waiting on the stairs to congratulate her.
“I don’t care half as much about being on the committee as I do about having friends like you to say they’re glad,” declared Betty, hugging Eleanor because there were a great many things that she didn’t know how to say to her.
“Yes, friends are what count,” said Eleanor earnestly, “and Betty, I think I’m going to leave Harding with a good many. At least I’ve made some new ones this week.”
And that was all the reference that was ever made to the way Eleanor’s oldest friend at Harding had treated her.
“Well,” said Betty, when everybody had congratulated her and Rachel, whose appointment on all 19—’s important committees had come to be a foregone conclusion, “I hope Nita and Rachel and K. won’t be sorry they came. You three aren’t so much mixed up in it as the rest of us, but I thought I’d ask you anyway.”