"Oh, Suzanne!"
Barbara had spent many minutes all told during the past four years of her college life saying, "Oh, Suzanne!" in precisely that shocked, protesting, helpless tone. The two were the best of friends, but in code of conduct and mode of thought they were the meeting extremes.
"Aren't you going to prescribe for me now you have diagnosed my case?" Sylvia came to the rescue.
"I did prescribe, but you wouldn't swallow Mr. Jack Amidon, sugar-coated pill though he is. How about your tawny-maned, giant, ex-football-hero M.D.? He isn't so good looking as Jack but--"
"I think he is much nicer looking," Barb interposed surprisingly, then blushed and subsided.
"Oho!" laughed Suzanne. "Better keep your eye on our Barbie if you want to keep Doctor Philip Lorrimer on your waiting list, Sylvia. Such unprecedented enthusiasm! And she has beheld him but once at that. Oh, the witchery of that Commencement moon! I inadvertently nearly promised to marry Roger Minot myself in its specious glamour. I'll wager our demure Barbie flirted with your six-foot medicine man when you rashly left him on her hands on the outskirts of Paradise. 'Fess up, Barb. Didn't you flirt a teeny weeny little flirt in the moonshine?"
"No, I didn't," denied Barbara, flushed and indignant. "But I did like Doctor Lorrimer. He talked sense, and I was awfully interested in his work in the free clinic."
"Sense! Shop! By moonlight! Ye gods!" mocked Suzanne. "Never mind, Barbie. Your tactics were admirable. Listen to 'em. Keep on listening to 'em. It's what the sex likes. It gets 'em every time."
"But I don't want to get 'em," protested Barbara earnestly.
Whereupon Suzanne giggled and tossed her victim a silver sheathed bonbon by way of reconciliation. Then she returned to her charge upon Sylvia, who had sat silent during the last sally, meditatively playing with the spray of scarlet creeper in her lap.