“I’d like to know, Essie,” drawled Cara, using the little name Esther detested, “what have you against Barbara Hale?”
“I!” How much she made of the smallest word! As if the idea were preposterous.
“Yes, you. Every time I mention Barbara you just seethe up.” Cara tossed up a shower of sand that slipped through her fingers in little streams—what was left of the shower did that. If, as she said, Esther did dislike Barbara, surely she, Cara, must have liked her, decidedly.
Esther didn’t try to answer the charge. They were, all three of them, just at that stage of young girlhood that might be called the mimic stage. They said smart things, or tried to say them, because older girls acted that way. True, the older girls never deigned to associate with Cara, and her “set.” Just “kids” they were still being inelegantly styled. But girls in second year high do feel rather important, and at this particular new summer season the three girls on the beach at Sea Cosset were not one whit less important—in their own way—than Elinor Towle, Katherine Barrett and Melinde Trainor, all over twenty, and now sitting on the same cozy little beach nearer the water. Merely degrees of difference separated them, but there seemed nothing essentially different between the two groups.
And to make the comparison still closer, here was Cara planning to give a house party.
“I don’t care what any one says,” Louise spoke up rather like a small girl again, “it’s a perfectly darling idea. Even if we all do live around here; what difference would a train ride make in a house party?”
“None; not a speck,” confirmed Esther, both the girls bracing Cara up in her resolve to give the party and worrying secretly lest she back out.
“Except,” chimed in Cara, “that when they come a distance they have to stay. If you girls get bored to death you could even sneak home in your nighties,” she wound up, turning a very good hand-spring to prove why she was such a fine basketball player.
“No danger of us sneaking home, Cara,” declared Louise. “I’m just crazy about the idea. And I know there are a lot of girls jealous because you didn’t ask them,” she flattered the prospective hostess.
“Really!” Cara reversed the hand-spring and threw up a veritable desert sandstorm with the turn. “The only reason I have asked just five,” she panted, settling again, “is because mother would only let me have three rooms.”