In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting Wilhelmina Campbell.
“We have never met,” she was saying, “but I heard you were going to enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you.”
“Thank you,” said Billie, who had a boyish, direct way of answering people.
“We wanted to know,” went on Belle quickly, “if you wouldn’t become a member of our society, the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive and nicest society in the school; the seven nicest girls in West Haven. We are all intimate friends, you know.”
Billie gazed with admiration into Belle’s lovely, childlike face. Her own hair was straight and secretly she had always admired curls. Belle’s pale golden hair curled about her low forehead in soft ringlets. Her great china-blue eyes looked appealingly into Billie’s gray ones, and her rosy lips, which were much too thin when her face was in repose, parted with a winning smile. She was dressed in blue a little darker than her eyes and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly on top of her curls.
“She looks like a picture pasted inside of an old trunk mamma used to have,” said Billie to herself. “I could almost believe she was a bisque doll. I never saw anything like her.”
“You will join us, won’t you?” went on Belle wistfully.
“I’m afraid I should be one too many and make an unlucky number. Seven is supposed to be lucky, isn’t it?”
“Oh, we’re not superstitious,” laughed Belle. “We can change the name to the ‘Happy Eight,’ or something of that sort. We are looking for nice girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you would be the one for us. We want to enlarge the club.”
“Dear me,” said Billie thoughtfully, “in a class of seventeen girls are only seven nice enough to be asked to join your club?”