"She's such a kid!" he explained the feeling to himself, "and Ernest isn't looking after her at all."
Katy entered into the romping heart and soul. Katy was playing young lady. Her pink cheeks and laughing eyes and little flirtatious ways were very popular with the boys--so popular that Mamie was vexed because many of her mates seemed to have eyes only for the city girl, as she called her behind her back.
Mamie eased her mind by treating her special friends haughtily. She got even with the recreant Grant by choosing Ernest the very first time in Post Office. She even put some of the girls up to boycotting the boys who were hanging round Katy, for one entire game, persuading them to choose Ernest and Sherm alternately till the others were jealously wrathful without being quite sure whether it was accident or conspiracy. Considering his scruples about kissing, Sherm submitted most meekly. He had the grace to color when Chicken Little remarked carelessly: "It wasn't so bad as you thought it would be, was it, Sherm?"
"Oh, it's different with boys," he retorted loftily. "Little girls like you don't understand."
"Little girls! I suppose you think yourself a man grown. You needn't feel so big because you're most seventeen. I heard Dick say a boy of seventeen wasn't really any older than a girl of fifteen, because girls grow up quicker. So there, you're not much more than a year older than I am!"
Sherm's "little girl" rankled not only that evening but for weeks afterwards. She told Katy and Mamie in strict confidence after they had gone upstairs that night.
"I'd show him if I were you, Jane," advised Mamie the experienced.
Chicken Little needed no urging, but she was in doubt how to proceed.
"My, I wish I was awfully beautiful and grown up. I'd make him fall so many billions deep in love with me he couldn't squeak." Jane felt positively vindictive whenever she thought of Sherm's patronizing tone. She had neglected to mention to the girls the little conversation that had preceded her remark to Sherm. She didn't consider it necessary to tell everything she knew.
Mamie tittered. "Pooh, you sound as if you had been reading Sir Walter Scott. They don't do things that way nowadays. When I was in town last winter at school I had lots of boys gone on me, and I'm not a raving, tearing beauty either."