“Never you mind about my mother,” snapped Lily, and turned her back on Mother Wit.
The latter took herself to task later, thinking she had been too presumptuous.
“But really,” she said to Jess, on their way home that evening, “I did not mean to be. Only, the man looks so unreliable. I’m afraid of him.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” said Jess, decidedly. “I only dislike him. But there is no accounting for tastes. My mother knew of a foolish girl who wrote to an opera tenor—one of those handsome, spoiled foreigners, and she sent him her photograph and told him how much she liked his singing—and all that. Just a silly letter, you know. But she didn’t sign her name and she thought he would never learn who she was.
“But he went to the photographer,” continued Jess, “and bribed him to tell who the girl was, and by that time she had written to the man several times, and he had written to her. So then he threatened her that if she did not give him five hundred dollars he would send her letters to her father. And she was in dreadful trouble, for she was afraid of what her father would do.”
“Oh, Lil won’t do anything like that!” gasped Laura. “I don’t believe she even thinks she cares about that Pizotti. It is only his foreign way that makes it appear so. But I believe he is flattering her about her play, and perhaps will get money from her or her mother.”
“Pizotti! Ha!” grunted Jess, before they separated. “I’m like Bobby Hargrew: I don’t believe that’s even his name. It sounds too fancy to be a real name.”
But Mr. Pizotti was an able man in his business. He came from time to time to the M. O. R. house and his advice regarding the play was always practical. He was something of a musician, too, and played the accompaniments for the girls who sang in “The Spring Road.” He suggested improvements in the costumes, too; and Lily Pendleton was entirely guided by his taste in her choice of the gowns she was to wear in the production.
Mrs. Pendleton was a very busy woman in a social way and allowed her daughter to do about as she pleased. Lily aped the manners of girls who had long since graduated from school and were flashy in their dress and manners.
To tell the truth, the after-hour athletics, governed by Mrs. Case, had been the one saving thing in Lily Pendleton’s life for some months. She would have become so enamored of fashion and frivolity, had it not been for the call of athletics, that she would have fallen sadly behind in her school work.