“Oh, girls, have you heard the awful thing that happened to me yesterday?” asked the girl with the eyeglasses. “No? Then, I had better tell you all about it myself. I had an engagement with Harry; we were to call on his aunt who lives in Rogers Park—nothing very exciting, you know. Well, Mr. Doolittle came in early to ask me if I wouldn’t go to the matinée with him. Now, I knew Harry would take me to see his aunt any day, and Mr. Doolittle might never ask me to go to the matinée again, so I accepted his invitation at once.”
“You would have been very stupid if you hadn’t,” said the president.
“So I thought. Then, I told him that I must stop in at the drug store and send off a telephone message. You see, I didn’t want to give Harry all the trouble of coming up in vain.”
“You are always so thoughtful,” said the blue-eyed girl.
“I try to be. I called Harry up, but he was not in, and I told the office-boy to tell him that I was ill, and could not go with him to Rogers Park, but hoped to be out in a day or two. The boy was as stupid as he could be; I had to repeat the message twice, and even spell my name. Oh, it was awful!”
“What? his stupidity?” asked the girl with the Roman nose.
“No; my own. As I was going out, the clerk stopped me, and said, ‘You needn’t have taken all that trouble, Miss Marion; you were telephoning to Mr. Vansmith, weren’t you? Well, that was he that just went out; he was standing about three feet away from you all the time you were trying to make the person at the other end of the line understand!’”
“Well, I hope your father is satisfied now,” said the president. “You have been trying to get him to put in a telephone all winter.”
“Humph; you don’t know my father very well, dear. When I told him about it, he only said that he was more fully satisfied than ever that women were not to be trusted with telephones!”
“Then there was that horrid drug clerk,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin; “why didn’t he stop you when Harry came in, instead of letting you—”