“I? Why, Toots, I spell it with a capital, but leave off the final x,” replied the Health Master cheerfully. “What kind of a game are you playing? Quarantining your dolls?”
“It isn’t a game.” Betty could be, on occasion, quite a self-contained young person.
“What is it, then, if I’m not prying too far into personal matters?”
“It’s for Eula Simms to put on her house.”
“The Simmses will be pleased,” remarked Julia.
“They ought to be,” said Betty complacently. “I don’t suppose they can afford a regular one like the one we put up when Charley had scarlet fever, two years ago. And Eula’s big sister’s got diphtheria,” she added quite casually.
“What’s that?” The Health Master straightened up sharply in his chair. “How do you know that, Twinkles?”
“Eula told me across the fence this morning. She’s excused from school. Three other houses on the street have got it, too. I’m going to make placards for them.”
“And do the work in play that the Health Department ought to be doing in the deadliest earnest! What on earth is Dr. Merritt thinking of?” And he went to the telephone to call up the Health Officer and find out.
“We’re due for a bad diphtheria year, too,” observed Grandma Sharpless, whose commentaries on practical matters, being always the boiled-down essence of first-hand observation, carried weight in the household. “I’ve noticed that it swings around about once in every five or six years. And it was six years ago we had that bad epidemic.”