up the spoon and goes on
ladling out the stuff in the dish at your place. What a monkey!"

"No, a missionary," corrected Berta, her eyes and mouth contradicting
each other as usual. This time her eyes tried to hide a troubled spark in
their depths while her mouth twitched over the joke of it all. "She is
posing as an awful example."

"Here I am again!" Bea appeared suddenly in her seat. "I find I'm
considerably hungry still," she vouchsafed in response to a chorus of
taunts and jeers. "Ideas aren't filling, so to speak. At least, mine
aren't--and they most of them belong to other people; hence I infer that
other people's aren't either. Is that plain, my dear young and giddy
friends? Now, somebody, applesauce!" she called, and added politely,
"please pass it."

Berta regarded her sternly. "Beatrice Leigh, you are running this scheme
pretty far into the ground. When you reach bed-rock, something is likely
to get a bump. Take care! Remember!"

"Thank you, yes, Berta. Half-past four at the swimming-tank in the
gymnasium. I'll be there. Trust me!"

"Trust you!" echoed Berta in withering scorn.

Bea lifted a face bearing a suitably wounded expression.

"I trust you," she murmured in touchingly plaintive tones. "I shall be in
the water at the stroke of the half hour--in the icy water. Promise that
you will not fail me."

"All right!" Berta dismissed the engagement from her mind with a heedless
assent. An hour later while she was absorbed in looking over the week's
daily themes which she had found in the box, Robbie walked in rather
disconsolately.

"Bea's writing a poem, too," she said; "she scowled at me."

Berta frowned in abstraction. "Yes," she muttered, "yes, yes."

Robbie looked at her and then stared out at the steady pall of rain. "I
think I shall go swimming with you, if you want me."

"Do come." It was a mechanical response while Berta's eyes narrowed in
the intensity of her application. "Now I wonder what that question-mark
on the margin can mean. She is the vaguest critic I ever had. Suggestive,
I reckon, and nothing else."

Robbie sighed. "Bea always used to be interested in everything. I wish
she wouldn't write poems. She walked right past four girls and didn't see
them. They were astonished. They asked me if she was sick or anything.
Her eyes were sort of rolled up in her head, as if she were being
oblivious on purpose."

"Um-m," replied Berta brilliantly from the depths of her own
obliviousnes