“How kind of you to champion me, dear; I really did not expect it.”
“Oh, yes; I often do it. He said—I wouldn’t repeat it to you, but the absurdity of the charge takes all the sting out of it. He said, ‘I consider Dorothy Darling the most heartless flirt I ever knew!’ Isn’t it too funny!” and she burst into a peal of laughter.
The blue-eyed girl paused to pat a little dog before she replied: “How well you do tell a story, Frances, dear. Look at that poor, old blind man over yonder; let us cross over and give him some pennies,” and she was almost dancing as she crossed the street.
“Perhaps he is an impostor, after all,” said the brown-eyed blonde. “By the way, you said somebody paid me a nice compliment the other day. Do tell me what it was, and if I ever get the chance—be it twenty years from now—I’ll do the same for you.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. Old Miss Lucy Brownsmith said to me, only the other day, ‘Really, Frances is quite a nice-looking girl now that she has given up lacing so tightly.’ I knew you would be so pleased. Well, here we are at the Club; I am afraid that I must have walked too fast for you, dear; you look quite flushed.”
“Oh, Emily, dear,” she whispered, as she embraced her friend in the cloak room, “Jack is wild with jealousy! He told Frances the other day that I was the most heartless flirt he ever knew!”
“Then, he is ready to go half-way toward making up! Oh, I am so glad that I—”
“Half-way? Do you suppose, Emily Marshmallow, that after allowing Clarence Lighthed to bore me almost to death for two weeks, I shall be willing to go half-way to make up with Jack?”
“But you said the other day that unless you did make up with him, you would learn to be a trained nurse and devote your life to others, and I thought—”
“Never mind what I said the other day—that was before I knew how jealous Jack was. And all I’ve got to say, is this: if you expect me to make a fright of myself in a gray cloak and bonnet and cotton gown just to please you, you are very much mistaken!”