"What do you mean?" asked Frances; "I didn't promise anything to anybody."
"You weren't with us when we promised, my dear," answered Alexia, "and
I'll rise and explain. You see we don't any of us like that Charlotte
Chatterton; not a single one of us. She's a perfect stick, I think."
"So do I," said another girl; "this is the way she walks." Thereupon followed a representation given to the life, of Charlotte Chatterton's method of getting her long figure over the ground, which brought subdued peals of laughter from the girls looking on.
"And she has no more feeling than an oyster," pursued Alexia, when she had recovered her breath, "or she might see that Polly was just giving up all her fun and ours too, by dragging her into everything that is going on."
"I know it," said the girls.
"And I'm so sick of her taking in everything so as a matter of course," observed Alexia; "oh! she's quite an old sponge."
"It's bad enough to be called an oyster, without having old sponge fastened to one," said Sally Moore, coming away from the mirror, thereby occasioning another rush for that useful dressing-room appointment.
"Well, she is both of those very things," declared Alexia, "nevertheless we must applaud her dreadfully when she's finished singing. That's what we promised each other, Frances. It will please Polly, you know."
"You better hurry, or you will lose your seats," announced a friendly voice in the doorway, which had the effect to send the whole bevy out as precipitately as they had hurried in.
When she was quite sure that no one remained, Charlotte Chatterton shook herself free from the friendly portiere-folds, and stepped to the center of the deserted room.