"What did you get in algebra, Flora?"
"B plus. And you?"
"B minus."
"Lilly Becker, that is the fifth B minus you've had in succession. I'm going to call you Lilly Minus."
"If she hadn't sprung that old oral exam on us—"
"Oh, if ifs and ands were pots and pans!"
Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about to be pretty. She was frailly fair, like her mother, and could already throw her blue eyes about their balls, in the Esperanto of coquetry. She had a treacherous little faculty of appearing never to study and yet maintaining an excellent grade of scholarship.
"You get me to do all sorts of things with you, Flora, and then you sneak off and study on the quiet and leave me to flunk because I promised you I wouldn't study, either."
"Why, Lilly Becker, I never studied one minute for that algebra quiz."
"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy told me."