The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake | Page 5

come. Did you?"
Dolly stared at her a moment. The question seemed to force her to give
attention to a new idea, to something she had not thought of before. But
when she spoke her voice was still defiant.
"Suppose I did!" she said angrily. "I wanted to have a good time--and
he was the nicest boy there--"
"Maybe he saw that you were waiting for him too plainly, Dolly.
Maybe he wanted to pick out someone for himself--and if you'd
pretended that you didn't care whether he talked to you or not he would
have been more anxious to be with you."
Dolly blushed slightly at that, though it was too dark for Bessie to see
the color in her cheeks. She knew very well that Bessie was right, but
she wondered how Bessie knew it. That feigned indifference had
brought her the attentions of more than one boy who had boasted that
he was not going to pay any attention to her just because everyone else
did.
But the gradually dawning suspicion that she might, after all, have only
herself to blame for the spoiling of her evening's fun, and that she had
acted in rather a silly fashion, didn't soften Dolly particularly. Very few
people are able to recover a lost temper just because they find out, at
the height of their anger, that they are themselves to blame for what
made them angry, and Dolly was not yet one of them.

"I suppose you'll tell all the other girls about this," she said. She wasn't
crying any more, but her voice was as hard as ever. "I think you're
horrid--and I thought I was going to like you so much. I think I'll ask
Miss Eleanor to let me share a room with someone else."
Bessie didn't answer, though Dolly waited while the wagon drove on
for quite a hundred yards. Bessie was thinking hard. She liked Dolly;
she was sure that this was only a show of Dolly's temper, which,
despite the restrictions that surrounded her in her home, and had a good
deal to do with her mischievous ways, had never been properly curbed.
But, though Bessie was not angry in her turn, she understood
thoroughly that if she and Dolly were to continue the friendship that
had begun so promisingly, this trouble between them must be settled,
and settled in the proper fashion. If Dolly were allowed to sleep on her
anger, it would be infinitely harder to restore their relations to a
friendly basis.
"I suppose you don't care!" said Dolly, finally, when she decided that
Bessie was not going to answer her.
And now Bessie decided on a change of tactics. She had tried arguing
with Dolly, and it had seemed to do no good at all. It was time to see if
a little ridicule would not be more useful.
"I didn't say so, Dolly," she answered, very quietly. And she smiled at
her friend. "What's the use of my saying anything? I told you the truth
about what happened this evening, and you didn't believe me. So there's
not much use talking, is there?"
"You know I'm right, or you'd have plenty to talk about," said Dolly,
unhappily. "Oh, I wish we'd never seen Will Burns!"
"I wish we hadn't seen him until to-night, Dolly," said Bessie, gravely.
"You know, that trip in the automobile with Mr. Holmes the other day
wasn't very nice for me, Dolly. If they had caught me, as Mr. Holmes
had planned to do, I'd have been taken back to Hedgeville, and bound
over to Farmer Weeks--and he's a miser, who hates me, and would have

been as mean to me as he could possibly be. That's how we met Will
Burns, you know--because you insisted on going with Mr. Holmes in
his car to get an ice-cream soda."
"That's just what I said--you pretended to forgive me for that, and you
haven't at all--you're still angry, and you humiliated me before all those
people just to get even! I didn't think you were like that, Bessie--I
thought you were nicer than I. But--"
"Dolly, stop talking a little, and just think it over. You say you didn't
have a good time, and you mean that you didn't have a boy waiting
around to do what you told him all evening. Isn't that so?"
"All the other girls had boys around them all the time--"
"You went with Walter Stubbs, didn't you? And you told him that
maybe you'd come home with him and maybe you wouldn't--and that if
anyone you liked better came along you were going to stay with them.
You didn't know Will Burns was coming, did you?"
"No, but--I thought if he did come--"
"That's just it. You didn't think about Walter