“Honest?” she said. “Me?”
When she understood, I remember how she walked beside me, looking at me as if she might at any moment find out her mistake.
Delia, waiting impatiently at our gate with her own basket,—somehow I never waited at the gates of others, but it was always they who waited at mine,—bade me hurry, stared at Mary Elizabeth, and serenely turned her back on her.
“This,” I said, “is Mary Elizabeth. I asked her to go to our picnic. She’s going. I’ve got enough lunch. This is Delia.”
I suppose that they looked at each other furtively—so much of the stupidity of being a knight with one’s visor lowered yet hangs upon us—and then Delia plucked me, visibly, by the sleeve and addressed me, audibly, in the ear.
“What’d you go and do that for?” said she. And I who, at an early age, resented being plucked by the sleeve as a bird resents being patted on the head, or the wall of any personality trembles away when it is tapped, took Mary Elizabeth by the hand and marched on to meet the Rodmans and Calista.
Calista was a vague little soul, with no sense of facts. She was always promising to walk with two girls at recess, which was equivalent to asking two to be her partners in a quadrille. It simply could not be done. So Calista was forever having to promise to run errands with someone after school to make amends for not having walked with her at recess. She seldom had a grievance of her own, but she easily fell in with the grievances of others. When I presented Mary Elizabeth to her, Calista received her serenely as a part of the course of human events; and so I think she would have continued to regard her, without great attention and certainly with no criticism, had she not received the somewhat powerful suggestion of Delia and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman. The three fell behind Mary Elizabeth and me as we trotted down the long street on which the April sun smote with Summer heat.
“—over across the railroad tracks and picks up tin cans and old rubbers and sells ’em and drinks just awful and got ten children and got arrested,” I heard Delia recounting.
“The idea. To our picnic,” said Margaret Amelia’s thin-edged voice.
“Without asking us,” Betty whispered, anxious to think of something of account to say.