There were clamorous demands for hot coffee, and then the toast was drunk standing, amid riotous enthusiasm.
"Speech!" called somebody.
"Speech! Speech!" chorused everybody.
"I never bet any such thing," responded Bob, sulkily. "You all know I didn't—and if I did, it was in fun."
"Never mind, Bob," said Nita, consolingly. "We won't tell any of the
Dramatic Club girls about it. We're all sophomores here, but Madeline
Ayres, and she's as good as a sophomore; so don't worry. You can trust
us."
"What I object to," put in Katherine Kittredge, solemnly, "is the principle of the thing. It's not true sport to bet on a certainty, Bob. You know that you're sure to go in to-night, and it's a mean trick to deprive Babe of her hard-won earnings."
This sally was greeted with shrieks of laughter, for it was a standing joke with 19— that Babe was supposed by her adoring mother to be keeping a French maid at Harding. In October of her freshman year she had packed the maid off to New York and engaged Emily Davis to do her mending. But the maid's board and wages were paid unquestioningly by her mother, who lamented every vacation that she could get no such excellent seamstresses as her daughter was always able to find at Harding. Meanwhile Babe rented a riding horse by the term, reveled in dinners at Cuyler's, and stilled her conscience with the thought that Emily Davis needed the money more than any maid.
"I wish," said Madeline Ayres, when the tumult had subsided again, "that you'd explain something to a poor, benighted little freshman. There's just one thing about Harding that I don't understand. Why should Bob mind having you know that she hopes she's going into the Dramatic Club?"
"Suppose she doesn't go?" suggested Christy. "Of course there's always a chance that she won't."
"Seems so nervy, anyhow," muttered Bob, who was still in the sulks.