With a whirl of her white skirts, amid the confusion that followed, the House Plant rose to her feet and the rescue of her chum. “Just because you can’t appreciate what a splendid mind Babbie has, Evelyn Clinton, and how much the English professors think of her, and what a prodigy she is, anyway—” “Hear, hear!” cried Barbara, laughing. “—And how proud we are of her,” went on the impetuous House Plant “Just because you have no soul is no reason why you should deny its possession by others!” “Well, I’ve stirred you all up, anyway,” said the Infant, comfortably. “And that is all I wanted.” Barbara took the spoon out of the fudge dreamily. “You may be right,” she said to the Infant. “You know I didn’t get the Eastman Scholarship.” “Don’t you ever mention that odious thing again!” cried Atalanta. “You know that the whole class thinks you should have had it.” Barbara turned her face aside to hide a momentary shadow. “Well, in any case,” she said, “there is work ahead for me. Every one who anticipates a literary career must work hard for recognition.” “You won’t have to,” declared the House Plant, hugging her chum, and followed by a murmur of assent from the floor. “Why, Babbie, didn’t you get five dollars from that Sunday-School Journal, and don’t they want more stories at the same rate? I think that is splendid!” “I shall not write insipid little stories when I go home,” Barbara answered, smiling kindly down at the enthusiastic little devotee who had subsided at her feet “I shall write something really worth while,—perhaps a story which will unveil characters in all their complexity and show how they are swayed by all the different elements which enter into environment—” “Ouch!” exclaimed the Infant “You are letting the fudge burn, and unveiling your characteristic of absent-mindedness to the set, who know it already. This stuff is done, anyway, and I’ll pour it out Or, no,—let’s eat it hot with these spoons.” The Infant dealt out spoons with the rapidity of a dexterous bridge-player, and the girls burned their tongues in one second, and blamed their youngest in the next. “By the way, Babbie,” suggested the Infant with a view to hiding speedily her second enormity, “you never told us the advice that New York editor gave you last week.” Barbara’s scorn rose. “He was horrid,” she said. “He told me that an entering wedge into literary life was _stenography_ in a magazine office. Imagine! He said that sometimes stenographers earned as much as twenty dollars a week. I told him that perhaps he had not realized that I was of New England ancestry and Vassar College, and that I was not wearing my hair in a huge pompadour, nor was I chewing gum.” The others looked impressed. “What did he reply?” asked the Infant. “He said, ‘Dear me, I had forgotten the need of a rarefied atmosphere for the college graduate. I am sorry that I am no longer at leisure.’ And I walked out.”