“Don’t I, though! Oh, girls!” Betty exclaimed dismally. “I just know that you are all thinking of yesterday. Wasn’t it terrible when I was at the board doing that problem and those visiting ladies came in and said that they were interested in watching the progress made by the young. I was so scared that every figure looked like a Chinese character to me, and how I did wish that a trap-door would open under my feet and let me gently down into the cellar. Luckily, Miss Donovan had no desire to be disgraced, and so she bade me take my seat and let Bertha do the problem.”
“I hate math., too,” Doris Drexel declared. “I’m like the little boy who said he could add the naughts all right but the figures bothered him.”
“In truth,” said Gertrude Willis, “there is just one of us who was born to be the treasurer of this club, and that one is Bertha Angel,—‘the only pupil in Seven B who can add and subtract with unvarying accuracy,’ as Miss Donovan so recently remarked.”
“Good!” cried Adele. “Bertha Angel, you are elected treasurer, but your duties will not be heavy, for at present there is no money to count.”
“I accept the responsibility,” said Bertha brightly, as she sprang up and made a bow.
“Now,” Adele inquired, “who would like to be secretary?”
“Secretary!” repeated Betty Burd blankly. “I thought that was a piece of furniture. My Uncle George has one in his study and it looks like a writing-desk.”
“So it is, fair maid,” drawled Rosamond Wright, “but didst thou never hear of one word having two meanings? The secretary which we want is a person to write down the clever things that we say and do.”
“I vote for Gertrude Willis,” called Doris Drexel. “Any one who could write such a composition as she read yesterday in assembly on the ‘Rights of the Indian’ surely ought to be recognized as a genius in our midst.”
“Thanks kindly,” laughed Gertrude; “I’ll do my little best.”