“They’ve been snubbing you—those girls!” he declared. “I knew they would—knew it as well as anything.”
“I don’t see how you could know that,” said Annie Laurie with a sudden feeling that she ought not say anything against Carin and Azalea. “They’re the nicest girls I ever knew; the nicest girls anywhere about here. If I haven’t been able to—to make them understand me, it’s my own fault, I suppose.”
“Nonsense!” cried Sam. “They’re not nice if they’ve been making you unhappy. How can you let them do it? No fellow could put it over me, now, I tell you. If he didn’t treat me fair and square, I’d have it out with him. We’d soon see who was the best man.”
“Girls don’t do things that way, Sam.”
“I know they don’t. They sit around and mope and sniff and feel mean, instead of making a good healthy row. I didn’t think you were such a hypocrite.”
“Hypocrite?” gasped the girl, too surprised to feel angry. “How am I a hypocrite, Sam?”
“Because you’re pretending to be contented when you aren’t. You probably act as if you liked those girls. And you don’t—you can’t—if they’re snubby. I say, stir up a fuss. Have a row. Tell ’em what you think of ’em. That will clear the air.”
“I’m under too many obligations to Mrs. Carson to do a thing like that, Sam.”
“Obligations!” snorted Sam. “Nobody is under obligations to be a doormat.”
All the way home the girl kept thinking of what Sam Disbrow had said to her. She would have liked to talk the whole matter over with her Aunt Zillah, but something held her back from complaining of the girls. Deep down within her was the feeling that if only she could manage right, they would yet be friends, true, “forever and forever” friends. If that should prove to be so, it wouldn’t do for this one and that one to be remembering that she had criticised them.