“Sure it is.”
“Oh, then that’s different. I didn’t know.”
“And you bully-ragging me the way you did!” reproached Sid. “Never mind. I still have some friends left. But I’ll pay for having your little new tie put in shape again, Tommy my boy. I’ll buy you new inner tubes for it, and a shoe, and you can have all the gasolene you want to make it go.”
“Oh, shut up!” retorted Tom, and he began to rummage in his drawer once more.
“What now?” asked Phil.
“My studs. I suppose some one has pinched them.”
But no one had, and Tom’s sudden energy in looking to see if he had all things needful for the dance suggested to the others that they might profitably do the same thing.
The invitations, which had come by special delivery, were put away with similar ones, and other relics of good times in the past, and then the boys began talking about the coming affair. Lessons for the next day were not as well prepared as usual, as might easily be imagined.
And the night of the dance! For the preserving of the reputations of my heroes in particular, and all young men in general I am not going to give the details of the “primping” that went on in the rooms of the four inseparables.
“It is simply disgraceful to see decent, well-behaved and seemingly intelligent human beings behave so,” Holly Cross remarked as he dropped in when the four were getting into their “glad rags.” He went on: “I never would have believed it—never, if I had not seen it with my own eyes.”