“Oh, joy!” whispered the latter to Nellie, who appeared next with the Lockwood twins. “Purt has found a shrine before which to lay his heart’s devotion. D’ye see that?” pointing derisively to Lily and young Sweet turning the first corner.
Hester was strolling away by herself. Nellie said, quickly:
“Let’s not go this way. I don’t want to meet that girl again to-night.”
“Much obliged to you, Nell, for taking my slapping. But Hester never really meant to hit me, after all. You got in the way, you know.”
“You’d better behave,” said one of the twins admonishingly. “You made this trouble, Bobby.”
“There you go!” cried Bobby, with apparent tears. “Nobody loves me; Hester tried to slap me, and Pretty Sweet wouldn’t even walk with me. Oh, and say!” she added, with increased hilarity, “what do you suppose the boys are telling about Pretty now?”
“Couldn’t say,” said Dora Lockwood. “Something ridiculous, I venture to believe.”
“It’s funny,” giggled Bobby. “You see, Purt thinks he’s really getting whiskers.”
“No!” exclaimed Dorothy.
“Sure. You watch him next time you have a chance. He’s always feeling to see if his side-tapes have sprouted. He has got a little yellow fuzz on his upper lip – honest!
“Well, Purt went into Jimmy Fabro’s shop the other day – you know, that hair-cutting place right behind Mr. Betting’s store, on the side street? Well, Purt went in and took a chair. Jimmy was alone.
“‘What you want – hair cut again this week, Pretty?’ asked Jimmy.
“‘No – o,’ says Purt. ‘Sh – sh – shave.’
“Jimmy grunted, dropped back the chair, muffled Purt up in the towels, and then squinted up and down his victim’s cheeks. Finally he mumbled something about being ‘right back’ and ran into Mr. Belding’s and came back with a watchmaker’s glass stuck in his eye. Then he squinted up and down Purt’s face some more and finally mixed a big mug of lather – and lathered Purt’s eyebrows!”
“Oh! what for?” demanded Dora Lockwood.
“That’s what Purt asked him,” giggled Bobby. “Jimmy said in his gruff way:
“‘I’m hanged if I can see hair anywhere else on your face, Pretty. You want your eyebrows shaved off, don’t ye, Pretty?’ So, Chet says, Purt’s been trying to shave himself since then in a piece of broken mirror out in the wood shed, and with a jack-knife.”
Although Nellie Agnew laughed, too, at Bobby’s story, she was in no jolly mood when she parted from the other girls and entered Dr. Agnew’s premises.
The doctor, Nellie’s father, was a broadly educated physician – one of the small class of present day medical men who, like the “family doctor” of a past generation, claimed no “specialty” and treated everything from mumps to a broken leg. He was a rather full-bodied man, with a pink, wrinkled face, cleanly shaven every morning of his life; black hair with silver threads in it and worn long; old-fashioned detachable cuffs to his shirts, and a black string tie that went around his collar twice, the ends of which usually fluttered in the breeze.
There had long since been established between the good doctor and his daughter a confidential relation very beautiful to behold. Mrs. Agnew was a very lovely woman, rather stylish in dress, and much given to church and club work. Perhaps that is why Dr. Agnew had made such a comrade of Nellie. She might, otherwise, have lacked any personal guide at a time in her life when she most needed it.
It was no new thing, therefore, that Nellie should follow the doctor into the office that evening after dinner, and perch on the broad arm of his desk chair while he lit the homely pipe that he indulged in once a day – usually before the rush of evening patients.
When Nellie had told her father all about the unpleasant quarrel at the gymnasium the doctor smoked thoughtfully for several minutes. Then he said, in his clear, quiet voice – the calm quality of which Nellie had herself inherited:
“Do you know what seems to me to be the kernel in the nut of these school athletics, Nell?”
“What is it, Daddy Doctor?”
“Loyalty. That’s the kernel – loyalty. If your athletics and games don’t teach you that, you might as well give ’em up – all of you girls. The feminine sex is not naturally loyal; now, don’t get mad!” and the doctor chuckled. “It is not a natural virtue – if any virtue is humanly natural – of the sex. It’s only the impulsive, spitfire girls who are naturally loyal – the kind who will fight for another girl. Among boys it is different. Now, I am not praising boys, or putting them an iota higher than girls. Only, long generations of working and fighting together has made the normal male loyal to his kind. It is an instinct – and even our friends who call themselves suffragettes have still to acquire it.
“But this isn’t to be a lecture, Nell. It’s just a piece of advice. Show yourself loyal to the other girls of Central High, and to the betterment of basketball and the other athletics, by – ”
“By what?” cried Nellie.
“By paying no attention to Hester Grimes, or what she does. After all, her shame, if she is removed from your basketball team, is the shame of her whole class, and of the school as well. Ignore her mean ways if you can. Don’t get in the way of her hand again, Nell,” and his eyes twinkled. “Remember, that blow was not intended for you, in the first place. And I am not sure that Clara Hargrew would not sometimes be the better for the application of somebody’s hand – in the old-fashioned way! No, Nell. Say nothing. Make no report of the affair. If Hester is disloyal, don’t you be. Keep out of her way as much as possible – ”
“But she spoiled our games with the other schools last spring, and she will do so again,” complained Nellie.
“Then let Mrs. Case, or somebody else, be the one to set the matter in motion of removing Hester from the team. That’s my advice, Miss.”
“And of course I shall take it, Daddy Doctor,” said Nellie slowly. “But I did think it was a chance for us to get rid of Hester. She is such a plague.”
The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “I wonder why it is that we always want to shift our burdens on other folks’ shoulders? Do you suppose either the East or West Highs would find Hester any more bearable if she attended them instead of Central?”
The girls of Central High had something of more moment than Hester Grimes’s “tantrums” to think of the next day. Bobby Hargrew came flying up the path to the doctor’s porch long before school time. Nellie saw her and ran out to see what she wanted.
“What do you s’pose?” cried Bobby.
“Couldn’t guess, Chicken-little,” laughed Nellie. “Has the sky fallen?”
“Almost as bad,” declared Bobby, twinkling, but immediately becoming grave. “The gymnasium – ”
“Not burned!”
“No, no! But it’s been entered. And by some awfully mean person. The apparatus on the upper floor has been partly destroyed, and the lockers broken into downstairs and lots of the field materials spoiled. Oh, it’s dreadfully mean, Nellie! They even sawed through the rungs of the hanging ladders a little way, so that if anybody swung on them they’d break.
“And with all the harm they did, nobody can tell how they got into the building, or out again. The watchman sleeps on the premises. You know, he’s not supposed to keep awake all night, for the same man keeps the field in repair during the day. But my father says that Jackway, the watchman, must have slept like the dead if he didn’t hear the marauders while they were damaging all that apparatus.
“It’s just too mean,” concluded Bobby. “There