“This is comfortable,” sighed Barbara, gratefully. “Let me take the spoon, Infant. Your four years of college life have not yet A. B.’d you in fudge.”
“Oh, you are not quite crushed by the pangs of the coming separation, after all, then,” grinned the youngest member. “Girls, did you hear an awful chuckle when our Barbara finished her Commencement speech yesterday? It was I, and I was dreadfully ashamed.”
“Mercy, no!” cried Atalanta, turning shocked eyes at the offender. “What on earth did you chuckle for, when it was so sad?”
“That’s just it!” said the Irreverent Infant. “When Babbie began to talk of Life and Love and the Discipline of Experience and the Opportunities for Uplifting One’s Environment,—wasn’t that it, Babbie?—I began to wonder how she knew it all. Babbie has never loved a man in her life” (the Infant glanced sharply at Barbara’s clear profile); “Babbie has never had any experiences to be disciplined about; Babbie’s environment, which is we, girls, hasn’t been especially uplifted by any titanic efforts on her part; and as for Life, why, Babbie’s had only twenty-one years of it, and some of them were unconscious. So when her oration ended with that grand triumphant climax, and every one was holding her breath and looking awed and tearful, I was chuckling to think how beautifully Barbara was selling all those people.”
A horrified clamor arose from the girls.
“Why, Evelyn Clinton! It was lovely!”
“Infant, you shameless creature!”
With a whirl of her white skirts, amid the confusion that followed, the House Plant rose to her feet and the rescue of her chum. “Just because you can’t appreciate what a splendid mind Babbie has, Evelyn Clinton, and how much the English professors think of her, and what a prodigy she is, anyway—”