“I’ve engaged a Thanksgiving table already at the Colonial,” Leslie announced, tucking her arm inside one of Doris’s. “I tried to get one at Baretti’s but the dago is sore at me. His tables are always engaged beforehand if I happen to want one on a holiday.”
“Couldn’t we go to New York the day before Thanksgiving and come back to Hamilton the day after?” Doris once more pleaded. “You won’t transact any business here on Thanksgiving Day.”
“That’s what you say,” Leslie made instant rejoinder. She laughed as though she was in possession of a rich joke. “I’ve a special business stunt to put over here on Thanksgiving Day. Get it straight this time, Goldie. I am not going to New York.”
“Then I shall go there alone.” Doris stopped on the threshold of the Lotus. She faced Leslie angrily as she made the stubborn announcement. For an instant the two girls fairly glared at each other.
“Go on inside, for goodness sake,” Leslie roughly requested. She had turned incensed eyes from Doris in time to spy three Hamilton students coming up the walk. Luckily their attention was focussed on the white car. Two of them glanced back at it. It was apparently the topic they were discussing.
“I meant what I said,” Doris began haughtily the moment they had seated themselves at a table. “You are so very queer. You seem to forget that I know London and Paris. What is New York to me?” Doris snapped contemptuous fingers. “Merely another large city.”
“You’ll find it a handful, if you try to tackle it all by your lonesome,” was Leslie’s satiric prediction.
“I don’t need, necessarily, to go there alone. I know two sophs who would be glad—”
“Forget it,” Leslie interrupted with a gesture of dismissal. “The three of you would have nothing on ‘Babes in the Wood,’ or any other of those lost nursery kids. In New York, unless you’ve been born and brought up there, you have to know the right sort of people, or you can’t have a good time. I could give you a letter of introduction to Nat Weyman, if I wanted to, but it wouldn’t do. She’d not like you, and you’d not like her.”
“I fail to understand why New York should be so—so different from London and Paris.” Doris was still haughty, though she was somewhat impressed by what Leslie had just said. “I don’t wish to meet Miss Weyman.”