"That's what Purt asked him," giggled Bobby. "Jimmy said in his gruff way:
"'I'm hanged if I can see hair anywhere else on your face, Pretty. You want your eyebrows shaved off, don't ye, Pretty?' So, Chet says, Purt's been trying to shave himself since then in a piece of broken mirror out in the wood shed, and with a jack-knife."
Although Nellie Agnew laughed, too, at Bobby's story, she was in no jolly mood when she parted from the other girls and entered Dr. Agnew's premises.
The doctor, Nellie's father, was a broadly educated physician--one of the small class of present day medical men who, like the "family doctor" of a past generation, claimed no "specialty" and treated everything from mumps to a broken leg. He was a rather full-bodied man, with a pink, wrinkled face, cleanly shaven every morning of his life; black hair with silver threads in it and worn long; old-fashioned detachable cuffs to his shirts, and a black string tie that went around his collar twice, the ends of which usually fluttered in the breeze.
There had long since been established between the good doctor and his daughter a confidential relation very beautiful to behold. Mrs. Agnew was a very lovely woman, rather stylish in dress, and much given to church and club work. Perhaps that is why Dr. Agnew had made such a comrade of Nellie. She might, otherwise, have lacked any personal guide at a time in her life when she most needed it.
It was no new thing, therefore, that Nellie should follow the doctor into the office that evening after dinner, and perch on the broad arm of his desk chair while he lit the homely pipe that he indulged in once a day--usually before the rush of evening patients.
When Nellie had told her father all about the unpleasant quarrel at the gymnasium the doctor smoked thoughtfully for several minutes. Then he said, in his clear, quiet voice--the calm quality of which Nellie had herself inherited:
"Do you know what seems to me to be the kernel in the nut of these school athletics, Nell?"
"Loyalty. That's the kernel--loyalty. If your athletics and games don't teach you that, you might as well give 'em up--all of you girls. The feminine sex is not naturally loyal; now, don't get mad!" and the doctor chuckled. "It is not a natural virtue--if _any_ virtue is humanly natural--of the sex. It's only the impulsive, spitfire girls who are naturally loyal--the kind who will fight for another girl. Among boys it is different. Now, I am not praising boys, or putting them an iota higher than girls. Only, long generations of working and fighting together has made the normal male loyal to his kind. It is an instinct--and even our friends who call themselves suffragettes have still to acquire it.