“It’s the ‘Comet’ that won her over,” observed Nancy.
“I don’t believe it,” answered their new, inseparable friend, who after two days’ association was as intimate with the three girls as if she had known them always, so rapidly do young girl intimacies grow.
“Something does seem to have happened to her,” said Mary Price. “Perhaps you gave her such a dressing-down, Billie, that she’s turned over a new leaf. She would never have stooped to talk to Fannie Alta before, but she is doing it now, and look—will wonders never cease?”
The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation. They were walking arm in arm up and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. At West Haven High School the girls either brought their luncheons with them to eat at recess or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working little woman, Mrs. Price, Mary’s mother, who made the sandwiches and brought them to the school herself in a big basket.
That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, “Will wonders never cease?” She had recognized the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which Belle Rogers must have bought from her mother, and which she was now sharing with dark, shabby little Fannie Alta.
“She used to say she would rather starve than eat one of mother’s lettuce sandwiches,” Mary exclaimed, “but she appears even to have come to that.”
“If this is one of your mother’s own, it’s very delicious,” exclaimed Billie, gallantly turning the conversation into other channels. After all, it was just as well not to form the habit of discussing Belle too much. Her father had never approved of criticising people.
“It doesn’t lead to anything but bilious headaches,” he used to say. “Sick, bilious headaches and a very yellow complexion. Critical people always look like that, Billie, my girl.”
Billie’s complexion was clear and healthy. She had never had a bilious headache in her life. But, then, she was not given to picking flaws in other people’s characters.
However, the novelty of the richest and proudest girl in West Haven making friends with a poor music teacher’s daughter was soon to be eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious incident.