all about staging this play. If it wasn't for him, I guess, 'The Spring Road' would suffer from frost," said Lily, with an unkind laugh.
"That may be," said Laura, flushing a little herself, for any slur cast upon her chum's play hurt her, too. "But his knowledge of how to produce or stage a play does not establish his private character."
"Pooh! you are interfering in something that you know nothing about," declared Miss Pendleton, loftily. "And it does not concern you at all."
"I do not believe your mother would approve," ventured Laura.
"Never you mind about my mother," snapped Lily, and turned her back on Mother Wit.
The latter took herself to task later, thinking she had been too presumptuous.
"But really," she said to Jess, on their way home that evening, "I did not mean to be. Only, the man looks so unreliable. I'm afraid of him."
"I'm not afraid of him," said Jess, decidedly. "I only dislike him. But there is no accounting for tastes. My mother knew of a foolish girl who wrote to an opera tenor—one of those handsome, spoiled foreigners, and she sent him her photograph and told him how much she liked his singing—and all that. Just a silly letter, you
