“How old is Beatrice?”

“She’s just seventeen, but sometimes she acts like a kiddy of twelve.  Mother says she doesn’t know what to do with her, the child is so full of capers.”

As the two girls entered the Homer apartment, Beatrice Homer ran to meet them.

“Oh, you’re Patty Fairfield!  I know you are!  Aren’t you the loveliest thing ever!  You look like a bisque ornament to set on a mantel-piece.  Are you real?”

She poked her finger in Patty’s dimpled cheek, but she was so roguish and playful, that Patty could not feel annoyed with her.

“Let me look at you,” Patty said, holding her off, “and see what you’re like.  Why, you’re a gipsy, an elfin sprite, a witch of the woods!  You have no business to be named Beatrice.”

“I know it,” said Bee, dancing around on her toes.  “But my nickname isn’t so bad for me, is it?” And she waved her arms and hovered around Patty, making a buzzing noise like a real bee.

“Don’t sting me!” cried Patty.

“Oh, I don’t sting my friends!  I’m a honey-bee.  A dear, little, busy, buzzy honey-bee!” And she kept on dancing around and buzzing till Patty put out her hand as if to brush her away.

“Buzz away, Bee, but get a little farther off,—­you drive me distracted.”

“That’s the way she always acts,” said Marie, with a sigh; “we can’t do anything with her!  It’s a pity she was ever nicknamed Bee, for, when she begins buzzing, she’s a regular nuisance.”

“Sometimes I’m a drone,” Bee announced, and with that she began a droning sound that was worse than the buzzing, and kept it up till it set their nerves on edge.

“Oh, Bee, dear!” Marie begged of her, “Won’t you stop that and be nice?”

Bee’s only answer was a long humming drone.

Patty looked at the girl kindly.  “I want to like you,” she said, “and I think it’s unkind of you not to let me do it.”

Bee stopped her droning and considered a moment.  Then she smiled, and when her elfin face broke into laughter, she was a pretty picture, indeed.

“I do want you to like me,” she said, impulsively, grasping Patty’s hands; “and I will be good.  You know I’m like the little girl,—­the curly girlie, you know,—­when she was good she was awful drefful good, and when she was bad she was horrid.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t be horrid,” and Patty smiled at her, “but all the same I don’t believe you can be very, very good.”

“Oh, yes, I can; the goodest thing you ever saw!  Now watch me,” and sure enough during the rest of Patty’s stay, Beatrice was as charming and delightful a companion as any one you’d wish to see.  She was bubbling over with fun and merriment, but she refrained from teasing, and Patty took a decided liking to her.

“I’ll make a party for you, Bee,” she said.  “What kind would you like?”

“Not a stiff, stuck-up party.  I hate ’em.  Can’t it be a woodsy kind of a thing?”