“Well, you’re nice ones,” said the discomfited carpenters. “Why aren’t you in your study?”
The girls looked very much ashamed of themselves.
“I was only just finishing something in a hurry,” Dolly said.
Phyl gathered her papers together, and picked up her candle.
“I’m just going down,” she said guiltily.
But Freddie reported them again next day.
“That Dolly was writing in the garden again on her knee,” he said, “and Phyl hasn’t been in the room all day.”
Again the carpenters demanded the reason, and again the girls made lame excuses, and hastened away to sit there forthwith.
But gradually the dapper little study fell into disuse, except when the makers were about, when the [240] ]girls, afraid of hurting feelings, and being told that they did not know their own minds, used to make a point of going and sitting there.
“It’s because you bump my chair so, Dolly,” Phyl said irritably, one evening when they had been fairly driven into the place by the indignant carpenters. “I’m sure I could write here if you would only sit still.”