Somehow, strange as it may seem, I did not feel an atom in the way, but rather that the presence of a third person, and that person myself, gave them both a certain daring bravado of speech that they would scarcely have risked alone with each other.
"What do I want to know?" queried Sagner. "I want to know—in fact—I'm utterly mad to know—just what your kind of woman thinks of 'Little Sister's' kind of woman."
With a startled gesture Madge Hubert looked back over her shoulder toward a creak in the literature book-stack, and Sagner jumped up with a great air of mock conspiracy, and went tip-toeing all around among the metal corridors in search of possible eavesdroppers, and then came flouncing back and stuffed tickly tissue paper into the gray cat's ears.
Then "Why don't you girls go to the Lennarts' any more?" he resumed with quickly recurrent gravity.
For a moment Madge Hubert dallied to shuffle one half of her pack of cards into the other half. Then she looked up and smiled the blond way a white-birch tree smiles in the sunshine.
"Why—we don't go any more because we don't have a good time," she confided. "After you've come home from a party once or twice and cried yourself to sleep, it begins to dawn on you very gradually that you didn't have a very good time. We don't like 'Little Sister.' She makes us feel ashamed."
"Oh!" said Sagner, rather brutally. "You are all jealous!"
But if he had expected for a second to disconcert Madge Hubert he was most ingloriously mistaken.
"Yes," she answered perfectly simply. "We are all jealous."
"Of her beauty?" scowled Sagner.