The girls laughingly assured her that seniors did sometimes condescend so far, and she went off with a happy look in her great gray eyes.
“We must have her in the ‘Merry Hearts,’” said Madeline. “She’s our kind if she can only get over that morbid feeling about her scar.”
“But we must be very careful,” Helen warned them, with a vivid remembrance of her first interview with Miss Carter. “We mustn’t ask her to join until most of us have been to see her and really made friends. She would just hate to feel that we pitied her.”
“We’ll be careful,” Betty promised her. “I’ll go to see her, for one, the very first of next week,” and she skipped gaily off to dress for dinner. After all there were plenty of things in the world besides the class play with its unhappy tangle of rivalries and heartburnings.
“And what’s the use of borrowing trouble?” Betty inquired the next evening of the green lizard. “If you do, you never borrow the right kind.”
Jean, to be sure, had done a good deal to justify Bob’s theory. She had remembered an urgent message from home which must be delivered to Polly immediately after luncheon, and she kept her innocent little cousin busily engaged in conversation in the lower hall of the Belden House until Betty appeared, having waited until the very last minute in the vain hope of avoiding Jean. But when they opened the door there was Barbara Gordon, also bound for Miss Kingston’s office, and much relieved to find that her committee were not all waiting indignantly for their chairman’s tardy arrival. So whatever Jean had meant to say to Betty in private necessarily went unsaid.
And then, after all her worriment, Jean was the best Shylock!
“Which is perfectly comical considering Bob’s suspicions,” Betty told the green lizard, the only confidant to whom she could trust the play committee’s state-secrets.
All the committee had been astonished at Jean’s success, and most of them were disappointed. Christy or Emily Davis would have been so much pleasanter to work with, or even Kitty Lacy, whom Miss Kingston considered very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early in her freshman year.
“And because she’s Kitty, it isn’t safe to give her another chance,” said Miss Kingston regretfully, when the fifteen aspiring Shylocks had played their parts and the committee were comparing opinions. “Yes, I agree with Barbara that Jean Eastman is by far the most promising candidate, but——”