“Ouch!” exclaimed the Infant “You are letting the fudge burn, and unveiling your characteristic of absent-mindedness to the set, who know it already. This stuff is done, anyway, and I’ll pour it out Or, no,—let’s eat it hot with these spoons.”
The Infant dealt out spoons with the rapidity of a dexterous bridge-player, and the girls burned their tongues in one second, and blamed their youngest in the next.
“By the way, Babbie,” suggested the Infant with a view to hiding speedily her second enormity, “you never told us the advice that New York editor gave you last week.”
Barbara’s scorn rose. “He was horrid,” she said. “He told me that an entering wedge into literary life was stenography in a magazine office. Imagine! He said that sometimes stenographers earned as much as twenty dollars a week. I told him that perhaps he had not realized that I was of New England ancestry and Vassar College, and that I was not wearing my hair in a huge pompadour, nor was I chewing gum.”
The others looked impressed.
“What did he reply?” asked the Infant.
“He said, ‘Dear me, I had forgotten the need of a rarefied atmosphere for the college graduate. I am sorry that I am no longer at leisure.’ And I walked out.”
“You did just right,” declared the House Plant, warmly, confirmed in her opinion by a murmur of assent from the girls.
“Right!” echoed the Infant. “Babbie, you are the dearest old goose in the world. You will never succeed nor make any money if you take an attitude like that.”