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“You’ll let me return the basket when I bring you the books,” Gray suggested, helplessly.

“I don’t know,” Johnnie hesitated.  Then, as a sudden inspiration came to her, “Mandy Meacham said she’d try to get me into a club for girls that Miss Sessions has.  She said Miss Sessions would lend me books.  Maybe you might just leave them with her.  I’m sure I should be mighty proud to have them.  I know I’ll love to read them; but—­well, you might just leave them with her.”

A little satiric sparkle leaped to life in Stoddard’s eyes.  He looked at the innocent, upraised face in wonder.  The most experienced manoeuverer of Society’s legion could not have handled a difficult situation more deftly.

“The very thing,” he said cheerily.  “I’ll talk to Miss Sessions about it to-morrow.”

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE USE OF WINGS

“I told you I’d speak a good word for you,” shouted Mandy Meacham, putting her lips down close to Johnnie’s ear where she struggled and fought with her looms amid the deafening clamour of the weaving room.

The girl looked up, flushed, tired, but eagerly receptive.

“Yes,” her red lips shaped the word to the other’s eyes, though no sound could make itself heard above that din except such eldritch shrieks as Mandy’s.

“I done it.  I got you a invite to some doin’s at the Uplift Club a-Wednesday.”

Again Johnnie nodded and shaped “Yes” with her lips.  She added something which might have been “thank you”; the adorable smile that accompanied it said as much.

Mandy watched her, fascinated as the lithe, strong young figure bent and strained to correct a crease in the web where it turned the roll.

“They never saw anything like you in their born days, I’ll bet,” she yelled.  “I never did.  You’re awful quare—­but somehow I sorter like ye.”  And she scuttled back to her looms as the room boss came in.  A weaver works by the piece, but Mandy had been reproved too often for slovenly methods not to know that she might be fined for neglect.  Her looms stood where she could continually get the newcomer’s figure against the light, with its swift motion, its supple curves, and the brave carriage of the well-formed head.  The sight gave Mandy a curious satisfaction, as though it uttered what she would fain have said to the classes above her.  Hers was something the feeling which the private in the ranks has for the standard-bearer who carries the colours aloft, or the dashing officer who leads the charge.  Johnnie was the challenge she would have flung in the face of the enemy.

“I’ll bet if you’d put one of Miss Lyddy’s dresses on her she’d look nobby,” Mandy ruminated, addressing her looms.  “That’s what she would.  She’d have ’em all f—­fa—­faded away, as the feller says.”