“I am done up,” she announced. “I am a dish-rag. I am a disgrace to look at, and I feel that if I do not follow Lovely Lucy Larriper’s advice and relax, I may be injured for life. Come, Dorothy, we must go back to our rooms and lie down, or I shall lie right down here in the gutter and do my relaxing.”
They returned to the hotel, and Dorothy almost ran through the lobby to the elevator, she was so afraid that Garry Knapp would be waiting there. She felt that he would be watching for them. The note he had written her that morning proved that he was determined to keep up their acquaintanceship if she gave him the slightest opening.
“And I’ll never let him—never!” she told herself angrily.
“Goodness! how can you hurry so?” plaintively panted Tavia, as she sank into the cushioned seat in the elevator.
All the time they were resting, Dorothy was thinking of Garry. He would surely be downstairs at dinner time, waiting his chance to approach them. She had a dozen ideas as to how she would treat him—and none of them seemed good ideas.
She was tempted to write him a note in answer to the line he had left with the clerk for her that morning, warning him never to speak to her friend or herself again. But then, how could she do so bold a thing?
Tavia got up at last and began to move about her room. “Aren’t you going to get up ever again, Doro?” she asked. “Doesn’t the inner man call for sustenance? Or even the outer man? I’m just crazy to see Garry Knapp and ask him how he came by my bag.”
“Oh, Tavia! I wish you wouldn’t,” groaned Dorothy.
“Wish I wouldn’t what?” demanded her friend, coming to her open door with a hairbrush in her hand and wielding it calmly.
Dorothy “bit off” what she had intended to say. She could not bring herself to tell Tavia all that was in her mind. She fell back upon that “white fib” that seems first in the feminine mind when trouble portends: