“Amelia is raving jealous of you, Cis, and you know why!” said Nan. “She’d have your scalp, if she could get it.”
“If she could get it she’d be welcome to it,” declared Cis imperturbably. “Anyone that lets a person get her hands on her scalp so she can lift it, deserves to be scalped; that’s what I say! Amelia can’t harm me as long as I do my work and tend strictly to my own affairs. If you mean that Amelia Day is still stewing because that puffy Harold Brown thought he’d enjoy thinking that he thought a lot of me—” Cis shrugged her shoulders to conclude her sentence. “Stuff!” she added.
Nan laughed, but she looked anxious. “All the same, Amelia would love to get you out, Cis,” she said. “Of course you don’t care a rap what Harold Brown does—”
“Care!” Cis interrupted her. “Ever see a chestnut worm?”
Both girls went off into a spasm of laughter, subdued, not to disturb their companions. Harold Brown was large, plump, puffy and abnormally white; nothing was needed to point Cis’s rhetorical question.
“Oh, Cis!” sighed Nan, as she sighed many times a day, in fervent, admiring delight over Cicely’s high spirits. “Such a Cis!”
Nan had a call just then, but when she had answered it and was free again, she turned to Cis.
“It’s not only Harold Brown, Cis; you don’t seem to care about any of them,” she said.
“Meaning boys and men?” asked Cis. “Wrong you are, my Nanny: I love ’em all.”
“Yes, like one of themselves!” retorted Nan. “But not the way they do you! You’re like a jolly boy yourself, friendly as anything, but you don’t—And there are lots of them crazy about you! You make them sort of crazy over you, Cis, with your come-on-stand-off way, and your sort of—heady charm, like champagne!”