"Why?"
"Why—why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking.
Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small, happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but—why do you say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"—she gave Stephen Lorimer a brief, friendly grin—"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, pretty-please, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"—she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole—"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And Jimsy's going, and he'll need me!"
Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you there, Mildred. He will need her."
"Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week and play football!"
Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped her.
"Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know what it comes to,—shall we? Run along, Top Step!"
"All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "You explain it to her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust young voice lifted on the lawn next door,—"Jim-zee! Oh, Jimsy! Come-mawn-out!"
"You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen."