“Thank you.  Only so can I command respect when I lecture my girls on their frenzied coiffures.  Oh, but I’m thankful I can live at home and don’t have to spend the nights with them!  Some of them are dears, but to be responsible for them day and night would harrow my soul.  Hook me up, will you, Rufus, please?”

“You look just like a smooth feathered bluebird in this,” commented Ruth, as she obediently fastened the severely simple school dress of dark blue, relieved only by its daintily fresh collar and cuffs of embroidered white lawn.

“I mean to.  Miss Copeland wouldn’t have a fluffy, frilly teacher in her school—­and I don’t blame her.  It’s difficult enough to train fluffy, frilly girls to like simplicity, even if one’s self is a model of plainness and repose.”

“And you’re truly glad to go back, after this lovely vacation?  Shouldn’t you sort of like to keep on typing for Uncle Calvin, with Mr. Richard Kendrick sitting close by, looking at you over the top of his book?”

Roberta wheeled, answering with vehemence:  “I should say not, you romantic infant!  When I work I want to work with workers, not with drones!  A person who can only dawdle over his task is of no use at all.  How Uncle Calvin gets on with a mere imitation of a secretary, I can’t possibly see.  Why, Ted himself could cover more ground in a morning!”

“I don’t think you do him justice,” Ruth objected, with all the dignity of her sixteen years in evidence.  “Of course he couldn’t work as well with you in the room—­he isn’t used to it.  And you are—­you certainly are, awfully nice to look at, Rob.”

“Nonsense!  It’s lucky you’re going back to school yourself, child, to get these sentimental notions out of your head.  Come, vacation’s over!  Let’s not sigh for more dances; let’s go at our work with a will.  I’ve plenty before me.  The school play comes week after next, and I haven’t as good material this year as last.  How I’m ever going to get Olivia Cartwright to put sufficient backbone into her Petruchio, I don’t know.  I only wish I could play him myself!”

“Rob!  Couldn’t you?”

“It’s never done.  My part is just to coach and coach, to go over the lines a thousand times and the stage business ten thousand, and then to stay behind the scenes and hiss at them:  ’More spirit!  More life!  Throw yourself into it!’ and then to watch them walk it through like puppets!  Well, The Taming of the Shrew is pretty stiff work for amateurs, no doubt of that—­there’s that much to be said.  Breakfast time, childie!  You must hurry, and I must be off.”

Half an hour later Ruth watched her sister walk away down the street with Louis, her step as lithe and vigorous as her brother’s.  Ruth herself was accustomed to drive with her father to the school which she attended—­a rival school, as it happened, of the fashionable one at which Roberta taught.  She was not so strong as her sister, and a two-mile walk to school was apt to overtire her.  But Roberta chose to walk every day and all days, and the more stormy the weather the surer was she to scorn all offers of a place beside Ruth in the brougham.