However, Tavia was too kind-hearted, as well as light-hearted, to allow her loss to cloud the day for Dorothy. She was just as enthusiastic in the afternoon in helping her friend select the goods she wished to buy as though all the “pretties” were for herself.
They came home toward dusk, tired enough, and lay down for an hour—“relaxing as per instructions of Lovely Lucy Larriper, the afternoon newspaper statistician,” Tavia said.
“Why ‘statistician’?” asked Dorothy, wonderingly.
“Why! isn’t she a ‘figger’ expert?” laughed Tavia. “Now relax!”
A brisk bath followed and then, at seven, the two girls stepped out of the elevator into the lobby of the hotel and found Garry Knapp waiting for them. He was likewise well tubbed and scrubbed, but he did not conform to city custom and wear evening dress. Indeed, Dorothy could not imagine him in the black and severe habiliments of society.
“Not that his figure would not carry them well,” she thought. “But he would somehow seem out of place. Some of his breeziness and—and—yes!—his nice kind of ‘freshness’ would be gone. That gray business suit becomes him and so does his hat.”
But, of course, the hat was not in evidence at present. The captain of the waiters had evidently expected this party, for he beckoned them to a retired table the moment the trio entered the long dining-room.
“How cozy!” exclaimed Dorothy. “You must have what they call a ‘pull’ with people in authority, Mr. Knapp.”
“How’s that?” he asked.
“Why, you can get the best table in the dining-room, and this morning you rescued us from trouble through your acquaintanceship with Mr. Schuman.”