as briskly. "How you-all can loaf around the
way you do is more than I can comprehend. Dot, your hair is coming
down."

Dot, who was called Dot, because she was a dot, though her parents had
intended her to go through life as Geraldine, lifted her eyebrows
slightly, and removing her four hairpins, shook down her hair and did it
up again. The process took four seconds.

"I'd rather have Dot's curls than Dorcas' brains," growled Bert to
Agnes, who reproached him with a look.

While Dorcas' motion was waiting for a second, there came down the road
two pretty girls, in fluffy gowns, their white sunshades tilted
charmingly. Max slammed the secretary's book shut.

"Hurry up and let's adjourn," he said, and Archie, suddenly energetic,
seconded the motion and carried it, so far as it concerned himself, by
going out to meet the newcomers and invite them to go canoeing at once.
Max followed suit, and the meeting broke up unceremoniously, but with a
sense of valuable achievement.

Dorcas, uttering harsh judgments upon the parliamentary methods of Polly
Osgood, and, by inference, of all Wellesley College, attached herself to
Bertha and Agnes for the homeward walk.

"See here, Dorcas Morehouse," said Bertha so suddenly that her sister
and Dorcas jumped. "If you think that just because you have been to
Chicago University for a quarter, you are going to run us all, this
summer, you are mightily mistaken. Agnes and Dot and I never went away
to school, and neither did Bess nor Winifred, but we aren't stupid, and
we won't have you patronizing us. Catherine Smith is intellectual enough
for any one, and she never snubs or patronizes; and as for Polly Osgood,
you wouldn't dare _hint_ a criticism of Wellesley if she were
within hearing, and you know it. So there! If this library scheme is
good enough for them, it is for the rest of us, and if you don't like
it, you can just stay out of it!"

Whereupon, Bertha, having delivered herself, even more to her own
astonishment than to any one else's, turned at the first corner and
walked rapidly away, leaving her embarrassed sister to placate the
wrathful Dorcas in any way her gentle heart suggested.

CHAPTER FOUR

WITH PAIL AND BROOM

"Please forscuse me. Here's the key," and Elsmere held out to Catherine
the aforesaid article, his honeyed voice and polite words matched by a
cherubic smile.

"The key?" asked Catherine. "O, the key to the library. How did you get
it?"

"Algy