“Trust you!” echoed Berta in withering scorn.
Bea lifted a face bearing a suitably wounded expression.
“I trust you,” she murmured in touchingly plaintive tones. “I shall be in the water at the stroke of the half hour—in the icy water. Promise that you will not fail me.”
“All right!” Berta dismissed the engagement from her mind with a heedless assent. An hour later while she was absorbed in looking over the week’s daily themes which she had found in the box, Robbie walked in rather disconsolately.
“Bea’s writing a poem, too,” she said; “she scowled at me.”
Berta frowned in abstraction. “Yes,” she muttered, “yes, yes.”
Robbie looked at her and then stared out at the steady pall of rain. “I think I shall go swimming with you, if you want me.”
“Do come.” It was a mechanical response while Berta’s eyes narrowed in the intensity of her application. “Now I wonder what that question-mark on the margin can mean. She is the vaguest critic I ever had. Suggestive, I reckon, and nothing else.”
Robbie sighed. “Bea always used to be interested in everything. I wish she wouldn’t write poems. She walked right past four girls and didn’t see them. They were astonished. They asked me if she was sick or anything. Her eyes were sort of rolled up in her head, as if she were being oblivious on purpose.”
“Um-m,” replied Berta brilliantly from the depths of her own obliviousness, “quite likely. Alas! there is another questionable question-mark. I do wish she weren’t so stingy with her red ink.”