A Book o' Nine Tales Part 12

"I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Granton, that my name is not Bessie.

I abhor that final _ie_; and more than that, I was christened Betty,--plain Betty,--and Betty I will be."

"Miss Betty, then, if that suits you; though why you should be so particular about that old-fas.h.i.+oned name, I'm sure I can't conceive."

"In the first place, it is my name," Betty replied, bending upon him a glance at once bewitching and tantalizing; "that ought to count for something; and in the second place, my family name isn't one that lends itself to soft prefixes. Besides all which, there has been a Betty Mork from time immemorial; and I shall never be one to spoil the line by changing my name."

"What?" Mr. Granton demanded mischievously. "Never change it? Are you vowed to eternal single blessedness, then, or shall you imitate the women's-rights women, who--"

"It is really none of your affair what I intend to do," returned she, bridling; "only, to go back to what we started on, I do intend to play in the tournament with Frank Bradford. I am not in the habit of breaking my promises."

The pair walked along the shady country road without speaking for a moment or two, the young man inclined to be sulky, his companion saucy and good-natured. The dropping suns.h.i.+ne, falling through the gently waving elm-boughs, struck golden lights out of Miss Mork's abundant chestnut hair,--her one beauty, it amused her to call it, although the smile which brought out her dimples and the l.u.s.tre of her eyes contradicted the words even while they were being spoken. Young Granton was fully alive to the attractiveness of the lithe figure beside him; indeed, for his own peace of mind, far too keenly. He was aware, too, of the difficulty of managing the wilful beauty, whose independence was sufficiently understood by all the summer idlers at Maugus.

"But you certainly knew I expected you to play in the tournament with me," he began again, returning to the attack.

"It isn't modest for a girl ever to know what a man expects of her until she's told," Betty replied demurely, "even in tennis. And besides, it was presumptuous for you to be so royally certain of my acquiescence in whatever you deigned to plan."

"I'll serve a cut so that you'll never be able to return it," threatened he.

"I can serve a cut myself," she retorted, with an accent which seemed to indicate a double significance in the words.

"Confound it!" he said, incisively, with sudden and inconsistent change of base, "it is perfect folly letting ladies into a tournament anyway.

Who wants them? They always make trouble."

"I understood that you wanted one," Betty answered, unmoved, observing the fringe of her parasol with great apparent interest; "but of course I knew your invitation was not to be taken too seriously."

"Oh, bother!" the young man cried, slas.h.i.+ng viciously at the head of a late-blooming daisy. "Why do you always insist on quarrelling with me?"

"Are we really quarrelling?" she laughed back with her most exasperating lightness of manner. "How delightful! If there is one thing that I enjoy more than I do tennis, it is a good quarrel."

"Tennis!" Granton retorted, the last shreds of his patience giving way.

"It must be allowed that you can quarrel better than you can play. No girl," he went on, with increasing acerbity, "can ever really play tennis: she only plays at playing it; and it spoils any man's game to play with her. For my part, I cannot see why they are to be admitted to the tournament at all."

"_Merci!_" exclaimed Mistress Betty, stopping in the sun-dappled way to make him a profound courtesy. "Now I know what your true sentiments are, and how much your invitation was worth. Thank you for nothing, Mr. Nat Granton. I wish you luck of your partner,--when you get one. It is a cruel shame that by the rules of the tournament it must be a girl!"

And before Granton was able to reply or knew what she intended, pretty Miss Mork, with her tripping gait, her bright eyes, ugly name, and all, had whisked through a turnstile and was half-way across the lawn of the cottage where her particular bosom-friend Miss Dora Mosely was spending the summer.

II.

While Granton continued his perturbed way down the lovely village street to the Elm House, which for the time being was the home of a pleasant colony of summer idlers seeking rest and diversion in Maugus, Miss Betty flitted lightly over the lawn and joined her friend, whom she found reposing in a hammock swung under the cool veranda.

"Oh, Dolly," was her breathless salutation, "I've got the awfullest thing to do! But I'll do it, or perish in the attempt!"

"Halloo, Betty!" was Miss Mosely's response and greeting; "how like a whirlwind you are! What is the matter? What have you got to do?"

"Beat Mr. Granton at tennis in the tournament."

"You and Mr. Bradford, you mean?"

"No; I mean all by myself,--in a single. I sha'n't play in the double at all, if I can get out of it without sneaking."

"What in the world has happened to bring you to this desperate frame of mind?"

"Well, Dolly, the fact is, Mr. Granton has been making himself particularly odious because I wouldn't throw over Frank Bradford to play with him, and--"

"I told you," her friend interrupted judicially, examining the toe of her slipper with much interest and satisfaction, "that you'd be sorry you agreed to play with Frank."

"But I'm not sorry," protested the other, with spirit. "Do you think I'm so bound up in Nat Granton that I can't get on without him? If he wanted me to play with him why didn't he ask me, instead of taking it for granted, in that insufferably conceited way of his, that I'd stand about and wait on his lords.h.i.+p's leisure? Oh, I'll pay him off! I shall go over to grandmother's every blessed day from now until the tournament and practise, so as to take down his top-loftical airs."

At which exhibition of spite and determination Miss Mosely fell to laughing, and said Betty's manner suggested pickled limes, which in turn reminded her of the chocolate-creams they had at boarding-school, and that brought to mind some particularly delicious marshmallows which had been saved until Betty should come over; and she added that it would be a very good plan to go into the house and devour them.

Over the flabby and inane confection with which the two friends regaled themselves, it was arranged that Dora should devote herself with Machiavelian shrewdness to bringing about a reconciliation between Frank Bradford and his betrothed, Flora Sturtevant, whose quarrel had led to the invitation which had involved Betty in her present difficulties. In the meantime, Mistress Mork was to give herself with great a.s.siduity to the practice of cutting, volleying, and such devices of skill or cunning as would make possible the realization of her bold plan of conquering Mr. Granton in the tennis tournament, over which all the young people were just then much excited.

These conclusions were not reached without much digression, circ.u.mlocution, and irrelevant discourse upon various matters, with a good deal of consideration of the dress which would be both convenient and becoming for the important games.

"I have almost a mind to try a divided skirt," Betty said thoughtfully.

"George saw one at a tournament in England, and it could be fixed so as not-- Oh, Dora, if George were only here! He knows all the new English rules and cuts, and all sorts of quirks. Oh, why did you have to quarrel with him just now? Now I shall lose my tennis just because you drove him away from Maugus."

"Why, Betty Mork! You said yourself you wouldn't stand his lordly ways; you know you did."

"Of course," returned her friend illogically; "but we both agreed that you'd have to make up with him some time; and I didn't know then that I should want him."

"But what could I do?" demanded Dora, divided between a sense of being deserted by her friend and a desire to have difficulties smoothed over.

"Any girl with decent pride would have _had_ to send George away. You know how I hated to do it."

"But you might send for him now."

"Oh, I couldn't. That would be too awfully humiliating. I wonder you can propose it."

"Men are so dreadful," sighed Betty.

The two forlorn victims of masculine perversity pensively ate marshmallows in silence for a moment, revolving, no doubt, the most profound reflections upon the vanity of human affairs.

"I'll tell you what I will do," Betty said at length, reflectively.

"I'll write to George and make him visit grandmother. He hasn't been there for a year, to stay; and, as grandmother says, she 'admires to have him.' I'll tell him if he'll stay there, out of sight, I think I can fix things with you."

"Oh, you delicious, darling hypocrite!" exclaimed her friend, embracing her rapturously. "You are a perfect treasure, Bet! I'll do anything to help you,--anything. I've been perfectly wretched ever since George went away; but of course I couldn't say so, if I'd died."

III.

"So you are not going to play with Bradford, after all?" Nat Granton said, flinging himself on the turf at Miss Mork's feet as she sat watching the tennis-players practising for the tournament.

"No," she answered. "He and Flora have recovered from their temporary alienation, and I was generous and took myself out of the way."

"Will you play with me?"

"Thank you; no. I shall not go into any team; and in any case, I know too well your sentiments on the subject of girls' playing to trespa.s.s on your good nature."