"I'm not a child," responded Belle very crossly, walking away from Nora and Brenda, "I do not need to be told what to do."
What Nora or Brenda might have answered, I cannot say, for hardly had Belle disappeared within the house, when Edith herself appeared, with Julia and Ruth.
Ruth was a pretty and amiable girl, about Julia's age, and therefore a little older than "The Four." She had been in the school for two years before the coming of Julia, but in all that time she had had only a speaking acquaintance with the other girls. Many of them would probably have been surprised had any one told them that they were very selfish in leaving their schoolmate so entirely to herself. It was not because they did not like her. They were merely so very much wrapped up in their own affairs, that they hardly noticed that she was often left to herself. Ruth lived in the suburbs, and as Belle had said, outside of school the other girls seldom saw her. At recess each little group had so many personal things to talk about that an outsider would have been decidedly in the way, and would, perhaps, have been a little uncomfortable in joining them. No one gets a great deal of enjoyment from reading a single chapter in the middle of a book, and so it is often hard to be a mere listener when the tongues of half a dozen girls are vigorously discussing people and events of which the listener has not the slightest knowledge.
Ruth herself was very independent, and as she was more interested in her studies than many of the girls at Miss Crawdon's she had acquired the habit of studying during recess. Since after school she spent more time than most girls of her age in outdoor sports, it did her no great harm to pass the half-hour of recess in this way. Ruth, as well as Julia, had undertaken to prepare for college, and it had been a great delight to her to have the latter placed with her in one or two special classes. Julia's liking for her had made Edith take a little more interest in her than would otherwise have been the case, but the ball game was the first important event in which she was included with the others of Julia's set. She naturally was pleased at the prospect of going with the others, for like Julia, she had never seen a great football game.
No one who saw the hearty way in which Nora and Brenda greeted Ruth, as she came up with Edith and Julia, could for a moment have imagined that she had been under discussion. The mercurial Brenda for the moment was so annoyed by Belle's proposed championship of Princeton, that she was unexpectedly cordial to Ruth, and almost to her own surprise found herself urging Ruth to come to town early on the Saturday of the game, to take luncheon with her and Julia.
The latter expressed her thanks in a glance towards her cousin, as Ruth accepted very gracefully, and Nora exclaimed, "What fun we are going to have; you know we are all invited to dine at Edith's that evening. Oh dear! I can hardly wait for Saturday."
"I know it," replied Brenda, "it's less than a week, too, but it seems an awfully long time."
Then they gossiped a moment in a very harmless fashion about the prospects of Harvard, and Edith quoted one or two things that Philip had said, and Nora told them that her father was perfectly sure that the crimson would win, and as they trooped into the dressing-room when the bell rang, Belle was surprised to see Brenda leaning on Ruth's arm.