"I was about to suggest that very thing," replied Miss Woodruff, regarding burglar-proof Victoria with a quizzical eye. "If this brave Victoria can instill some of her surplus courage into this quaking Lillian and this shuddering Augusta, by all means let her do it."
"Victoria is really almost too courageous," remarked Mrs. Henry Rhodes, when the girls had left the school room. "She just bristles with bravery. I'd like to frighten her just once. She'd have made a fine boy, wouldn't she, with those broad, sturdy shoulders!"
"She'd have made a blustering one. I suspect that if she _had_ been one, every other boy that knew her would have been tempted to put her bravery to the test. I don't think that boys take as kindly to braggarts as girls do."
But even the girls, with the exception of timid Lillian and terrified Augusta, began to grow tired of Victoria's boasting; for, braced by the admiring devotion of her roommates, Victoria could talk of nothing but her own bravery.
"If a burglar came," Victoria would brag, "I'd look him straight in the eye and say: 'See here, Mr. Burglar, I want to talk to you as man to man. I take it you're a man of sense. Your time is valuable. You're wasting it here. We've only thirty cents a week pocket money. If you were mean enough to take it all you wouldn't get much. Our jewels came from the five and ten cent store; so just run along to a place where they really _have_ money.'"
"Yes, I would. I've never seen the time yet when I've really been afraid of anything."
"They say," quavered Lillian, "that they found footsteps--yes, Marjory, I meant foot-prints--under the Browns' dining room window last Friday--only three houses from this one. Oh, I'm so scared I can't eat my meals."
"Don't be alarmed," said Victoria. "You have _me_."
Victoria had bragged all day. She was still bragging when she climbed into bed, with Lillian's cot at her left, Augusta's at her right.
An hour later, the west corridor was wrapped in silence; or it would have been if nine girls had not assembled in Henrietta's room to whisper excitedly in one another's ears. Inadvertently, they whispered too in Miss Woodruff's, as she stood listening just outside the door. Miss Woodruff was not a prying person. She was merely assuring herself that the noises that she couldn't help hearing were made by girls, not burglars.