But the chance could not be made during scraps of such whispered conversation as the two girls were having in a crowded “movie” house.
CHAPTER X
HOW GIRLS CHOOSE CHUMS
When the girls had quite exhausted all their powers of teasing Babs for again going off with the boys—just as she knew they would—she decided to ride to the ice-cream place in the big car, and she also decided to sit in the back with all the girls.
“Take your boys,” Babs told them, in imitation of their own manner. “For my part I’m just dying for a chat with you girls. Don’t you realize I’ve hardly become acquainted yet?” This last was said in a comical mimicking way, just as if she were some one of real importance who had been so busy with a whole lot of social affairs that she really couldn’t reach all the friends who were—perhaps?—pining for her attention.
“Oh, we know all about that,” replied Louise. “It must be an awful bore to be so popular.” Louise was not being sarcastic, just flippant this time.
“And the peasants—those bothersome Italians——” Esther Dean remarked. “Babs dear, you really should not mingle so freely with the gentry.”
“The gentry? You mean the bourgeois——” broke in Ruth.
“Hey, hey!” called back Glenn Gaynor from the front seat. “What is this, anyway, a test or something? Where are we going? That’s what I want to know.” He was driving.
“We’re going to Hill’s, of course,” answered Cara. “And if we don’t go straight there we’ll never find a place to sit down, to say nothing of getting a dish of ice-cream.”
It was a wonderful summer evening, and behind the rose-covered lattice that so beautifully screened Hill’s ice-cream tables, the girls and boys of Cara Burke’s party thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Babs almost forgot little Nicky’s troubles, as she laughed and chatted and “showed off” to her very best advantage, her one regret being that her father didn’t happen along to the drug-store that evening to see how well she was doing.