It was all perfectly thrilling and Tessie felt each day she mingled her "better days' smile" with a sob or a grin, for the benefit of her sympathetic spectators, she would have given a week's pay to have Dagmar seen the "hit" she was making.
"They'll be giving me French lessons if I don't watch out," she told her looking-glass one night, and the confidential mirror noticed the new girl actually sounded her "gs." Tessie was an apt pupil, but brains more than hands need training to execute exact science of "putting things over" all the time.
Also a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link in this adventurer's chain was the fact that she had no means of communicating with her own folks or Dagmar, and receiving any reply from them. She knew her own father too well to risk letting him know anything of her whereabouts, and her two letters to Dagmar could not be answered for lack of address. Now Tessie had new clothes, and she would soon have more money—if only she could get hold of Dagmar, and start off again on that trip to the big city.
"Maybe the poor kid's in jail," she reflected. "She's just the kind to get sent up to one of those dumps where they train girls! Train them!" she repeated mockingly. "Swell training a girl gets behind bars!
"But it would cost twenty-five dollars for both of us, and I'll never live through earning that here," she followed. This general summing up of the situation took place in her room, the night before her first "afternoon off" and suppose—just suppose she took a bunch of those scout tickets, and went out to the next town and sold them! She might use that money to send to Dagmar and replace it with her next week's pay!
So there was the temptation.
And she did not realize its dangers.
Nothing had ever been easier. Everyone wanted tickets for the Violet Shut-in Benefit and every ticket brought fifty cents to the attractive girl wearing the scout badge of merit.
"I call this luck, the kind that grows on bushes," she was thinking, as in that strange town she hurried from door to door with the violet bits of pasteboard that were printed to bring cheer to the Shut Ins.
"Of course I'll replace this at once," she also decided. "I wouldn't really touch a cent of this, even for one day, only I must get Daggie out of her trouble wherever she is. It isn't fair to leave her all alone to face the music."