"What are they going to have them for?" asked Elizabeth, drying her eyes on her pinafore. She could understand one desiring a bow on the hair, but what would be the function, either useful or ornamental, of the kind Rosie indicated was hard to understand.
Rosie twisted one of her curls coyly. "Oh, just because," she explained. "All the girls are getting them."
Elizabeth became interested. "Have you one, Rosie?" she whispered, and Rosie tossed her curls and giggled, but gave no answer. Elizabeth looked puzzled. Often Rosie seemed so old and wise and far away, making her feel as if she were Jamie's age.
"How do you get one?" was the next question.
"Oh, my goodness!" giggled Rosie. Such ignorance did not admit of any enlightenment. "They just—come," she explained vaguely.
The Junior Fourth class was being called forward and there was no more opportunity for explanations. But, as they passed up the aisle, Elizabeth noticed Rosie flirt her curls and glance towards Hector McQueen's seat, and Hector's admiring eyes followed Rosie all the way to her class. "Is yours Hector McQueen?" Elizabeth whispered as soon as they reached their scat again, and Rosie nodded radiantly. Elizabeth was both proud and pleased. She did not know much about boys, apart from John and Malcolm and the Pretender. All outside this list were classed in her mind as "other boys," and were an unknown waste. But Hector McQueen, everybody knew, was quite the nicest boy in school. It was just like Rosie to carry off the prize.
As the days went on, Elizabeth, now fully awake to the fashion of the hour, noticed that Rosie had been quite right—"all the girls" had beaux. Even big, untidy Becky Davis was receiving attentions from Noah Clegg, Junior. She furthermore discovered that your beau brought you apples and butter-nuts to school. That you trimmed his hat with colored maple leaves at recess, and always chose him as your partner in games; that he wrote you notes in school, when Miss Hillary was answering her Wednesday letter, and you wrote back; and, above all, that the other girls wrote your name and his side-by-side on a slate, struck out all the common letters, and over the remainder chanted, "Friendship, Love, Hatred, Marriage." If the result on both sides was satisfactory, there was nothing more to be desired.
Elizabeth noticed all this commotion and felt rather forlorn. Personally she would have preferred very much not to have a beau. It was something quite unnecessary; but then one hated to be different, and she was the only girl in her class, except Eppie Turner, who was too shy to speak to a boy, who was in a beauless state. Rosie, in her loyalty, felt Elizabeth's undesirable condition and strove to better it.
"I'll tell you, Lizzie," she advised one day. "You pick out a boy and I'll cancel your names and then you can have him for your fellow."
Elizabeth looked about her reluctantly. This was a most distasteful task. Yet, when pickles were the fad, though green cucumbers made her deadly sick, she had always had one in her desk; so surely a beau could not be worse. Rosie followed her eyes trying to assist. "You must have somebody older than yourself," she admonished, as her chum's eyes rested fondly on the row of little fellows in Archie's class. Elizabeth sighed; to have Rosie's little, curly-headed brother Dicky for one's beau would have been perfectly lovely. She glanced further down the aisle. Rosie indicated those who were "taken." The rights of property were strictly observed and there were no flirts in the Forest Glen School.