Barbara Hale: A Doctor's Daughter

They dug their heels deeper into the white sand. As they were bare heels there seemed to be nothing else to do with them.

“I think it’s simply a wonderful idea,” Louise St. Clair reiterated, “only, I can’t just see how you are going to feed us all for three whole days, Cara.”

“Feed you! Dear child, that’s the easiest part of it. Lottie adores feeding the hungry. But what bothers me is what I can do to keep you all happy.” Cara Burke, who had never been called Caroline, took her heels out of the sand and stuck them up in the sunshine. She was so strictly modern and so much up to date that her own personal schedule must have been eons ahead of the time marked on the pretty calendars sent around by M. Helmer, the butcher.

“A house party is bound to make us all so happy we’ll never want to go home, Cara,” declared Esther Deane, she with a new boyish bob hair-cut that she couldn’t keep her hands off. “I’d like to fetch my trunk, if we only lived a few blocks farther away.”

“Fetch it; there’re bushels of room out in the garage,” responded Cara mischievously. “But you know, children, my list isn’t filled yet. I have just got to have Barbara Hale.”

“Barbara Hale!” Both girls exclaimed in perfect unison.

“Yes.” Cara squatted on her bare feet now and showed signs of conflict. “I want her. I like her. She’s so different, she’s sure to be good fun.”

“Good fun!” Esther almost sneered. “About as funny as a Latin exam, I’d guess. She looks different, and she is different. But at a house party! Cara, you’re crazy.”

“So they say,” agreed Cara dryly. “But I’m going to ask her, just the same.”

“She’ll never leave that dad of hers,” declared Louise. “You know he’s some kind of a queer doctor and they say she’s going to be a nurse.”

“He’s a bacteriologist,” Esther informed her friends, with that very definite tone always peculiarly Esther’s when she knew anything so worth while as that.

“Well,” drawled Cara, “Dudley says she’s a peach, and while he’s not to come to the party he might just look in and——”

“And poor us! We may have to rival a peach,” moaned Louise. “I do wish you wouldn’t, Cara,” she pleaded again. “Honestly, I am afraid of anything so high and mighty as Barbara Hale.”