“Billie,” whispered Nancy, “there is that brutal old woman who was so rude to the chambermaid this morning. I honestly believe she would have struck you with her stick if you had answered a word.”
“If she had,” replied Billie, laughing, “and I had cabled it to Papa, he would have taken a flying leap across the Atlantic Ocean and got here before midnight. But I really don’t think she would have dared go that far.”
“Be careful, here she is upon us,” warned Elinor, and the four girls, without intending to be rude, turned their eyes toward the approaching figure.
The old woman still wore her flapping garden hat tied under the chin with brown silk strings. She leaned on her cane heavily as she walked, and noticed no one until she saw the four pairs of eyes regarding her with evident curiosity.
She paused in front of the group and brandished her stick in their faces.
“Well, what do you think you are looking at,” she cried, “a chimpanzee or an elephant or one of your own native wild people?”
“Oh, grandmamma,” cried a tall, slender girl walking at her side. “How can you talk in that way? You mortify me terribly.” And she led the old woman into the hall.
“What a fierce old party,” exclaimed a young man in white flannels, who was sitting so low in a deep chair that he appeared all legs and arms. “‘Native wild people,’” he repeated, laughing gaily. “We look like native wild people in this civilized place, don’t we?”
“Now, Timothy,” said a girl sitting next to him, “she meant you, I am sure. You resemble a native wild person more than any one here, with your absurd bristling red hair.”
The young man laughed good-naturedly, and the girls could not resist joining in, for Timothy might have been taken for a human porcupine any day. And that was how the Motor Maids came to make friends with Timothy Peppercorn, whose ridiculous name and funny appearance never failed to set them laughing.