“The mayor is speaking,” said a voice like vinegar right into Barbara’s surprised right ear.
Her silence then was resolute.
CHAPTER XXI
BRIGHTER BUT NOT QUITE CLEAR
So that was what the girls meant when they spoke of the threatened reform school. Miss Davis had not burst out in anger, as Babs had imagined she might have done. How different things were after all. Perhaps it was foolish to get so excited. But the girls seemed so hateful. That was what hurt so. They just enjoyed cutting her, Barbara was quickly thinking, and in doing so she was again building up a wall of imagination that might be all wrong; just as she had been wrong about the reform school.
It had been a wonderful opening at the Community House. Speeches were made by many prominent men and women interested in the development of the Community House plan, and of course, a tribute had been paid to the girls’ part in the affair. Best of all Barbara Hale stood there, right beside her proud father, and heard her own name called out as a most efficient young chairman. There was some satisfaction in that.
How much that made up for! Barbara hadn’t realized that she cared until the glory was being all swept away, when the girls threatened to resign. But all the same, she saw them there now with Cara as cheer leader, and they did clap their hands in the applause that followed the calling out of her name. So perhaps they were sorry for their spite. She was glad of that too. Another surprise for her. Miss Davis stood beside her and had her kindly arm around Barbara’s waist. This, no doubt, had helped change the girls’ opinion. Or maybe it wasn’t changed either way, as she had feared.
Well, at any rate, things looked brighter. The family sampler was placed among the things to be selected in the final issue of prizes, and none of the other girls had brought any heirlooms in. Cara talked of loaning a very old Chinese print, but she decided it might not be understood so she didn’t bring it in after all.
“Might think the laundry man gave it to us for Christmas,” she joked when Babs urged her to fetch it. “No, I don’t think I will. It wouldn’t jibe in with Mrs. Brownell’s early American table.” This of course had become the standard joke of the entire exhibit. The table set the style. If it didn’t go with the table it wouldn’t go with the show, was the way Cara argued, humorously.
So that Babs had fared very well after all, and she cared because her father cared. Now folks would not speak of her as a girl deprived of a girl’s pleasures, because she had to help her father in his laboratory work.
Everything was bustle and confusion when Cara slipped around through a little pantry door, came up the back way, and grabbed Barbara.