The Copy-Cat [22]
be in it; she's nothing but a girl," said Arnold Carruth, fiercely. Lily Jennings lifted her chin and surveyed him with queenly scorn. "And what are you?" said she. "A little boy with curls and baby socks." Arnold colored with shame and fury, and subsided. "Mind you don't tell," he said, taking Johnny's cue. "I sha'n't tell," replied Lily, with majesty. "But you'll tell yourselves if you talk one side of trees without looking on the other." There was then only a few moments before Madame's musical Japanese gong which announced the close of intermission should sound, but three determined souls in conspiracy can accomplish much in a few moments. The first move was planned in detail before that gong sounded, and the two boys raced to the house, and Lily followed, carrying a toad- stool, which she had hurriedly caught up from the lawn for her object of nature to be taken into class. It was a poisonous toadstool, and Lily was quite a heroine in the class. That fact doubtless gave her a more dauntless air when, after school, the two boys caught up with her walking gracefully down the road, flirting her skirts and now and then giving her head a toss, which made her fluff of hair fly into a golden foam under her daisy-trimmed straw hat. "To-night," Johnny whispered, as he sped past. "At half past nine, between your house and the Simmonses'," replied Lily, without even looking at him. She was a past-mistress of dissimulation. Lily's mother had guests at dinner that night, and the guests remarked sometimes, within the little girl's hearing, what a darling she was. "She never gives me a second's anxiety," Lily's mother whispered to a lady beside her. "You can- not imagine what a perfectly good, dependable child she is." "Now my Christina is a good child in the grain," said the lady, "but she is full of mischief. I never can tell what Christina will do next." "I can always tell," said Lily's mother, in a voice of maternal triumph. "Now only the other night, when I thought Christina was in bed, that absurd child got up and dressed and ran over to see her aunt Bella. Tom came home with her, and of course there was nothing very bad about it. Christina was very bright; she said, 'Mother, you never told me I must not get up and go to see Aunt Bella,' which was, of course, true. I could not gainsay that." "I cannot," said Lily's mother, "imagine my Lily's doing such a thing." If Lily had heard that last speech of her mother's, whom she dearly loved, she might have wavered. That pathetic trust in herself might have caused her to justify it. But she had finished her dinner and had been excused, and was undressing for bed, with the firm determination to rise betimes and dress and join Johnny Trumbull and Arnold Carruth. Johnny had the easiest time of them all. He simply had to bid his aunt Janet good night and have the watch wound, and take a fleeting glimpse of his mother at her desk and his father in his office, and go whistling to his room, and sit in the summer darkness and wait until the time came. Arnold Carruth had the hardest struggle. His mother had an old school friend visiting her, and Arnold, very much dressed up, with his curls falling in a shining fleece upon a real lace collar, had to be shown off and show off. He had to play one little piece which he had learned upon the piano. He had to recite a little poem. He had to be asked how old he was, and if he liked to go to school, and how many teachers he had, and if he loved them, and if he loved his little mates, and which of them he loved best; and he had to be asked if he loved his aunt Dorothy, who was the school friend and not his aunt at all, and would he not like to come and live with her, because she had not any dear little boy; and he was obliged to submit to having his curls twisted around feminine fingers, and to being kissed and hugged, and a whole chapter of ordeals, before he was finally in bed, with his mother's kiss moist upon his lips, and free to assert himself. That night Arnold Carruth realized himself as having an actual horror of his helpless state of pam- pered