Excerpt
ABOUT TEETH AND TEDDY BEARS.
“Girls, I have some great news for you. I’m sure you’ll be interested, and I hope you’ll be as delighted as I am. Come on, all of you. Gather around in a circle just as if we were going to have a Council Fire and I’ll tell you something that will—that will—Teddy Bear your teeth.”
A chorus of laughter, just a little derisive, greeted Katherine Crane’s enigmatical figure of speech. The merriment came from eleven members of Flamingo Camp Fire, who proceeded to form an arc of a circle in front of the speaker on the hillside grass plot near the white canvas tents of the girls’ camp.
“What does it mean to Teddy Bear your teeth?” inquired Julietta Hyde with mock impatience. “Come, Katherine, you are as much of a problem with your ideas as Harriet Newcomb is with her big words. Do you know the nicknames some of us are thinking of giving to her?”
“No, what is it?” Katherine asked.
“Polly.”
“Polly? Why Polly?” was the next question of the user of obscure figures of speech, who seemed by this time to have forgotten the subject that she started to introduce when she opened the conversation.
“Polly Syllable, of course,” Julietta answered, and the burst of laughter that followed would have been enough to silence the most ambitious joker, but this girl fun-maker was not in the least ambitious, so she laughed appreciatively with the others.
“Well, anyway,” she declared after the merriment had subsided; “Harriet always uses her polysyllables correctly, so I am not in the least offended at your comparison of my obscurities with her profundities. There, how’s that? Don’t you think you’d better call me Polly, too?”
“Not till you explain to us what it means to Teddy Bear one’s teeth,” Azalia Atwood stipulated sternly. “What I’m afraid of is that you’re trying to introduce politics into this club, and we won’t stand for that a minute.”
“Oh, yes, Julietta, you may have your wish, if what Azalia says is true,” Marie Crismore announced so eagerly that everybody present knew that she had an idea and waited expectantly for it to come out. “We’ll call you Polly—Polly Tix.”
Of course everybody laughed at this, and then Harriet Newcomb demanded, that her rival for enigmatical honors make good.
“What does it mean to Teddy Bear one’s teeth?” she demanded.
“Oh, you girls are making too much of that remark,” Katherine protested modestly, “I really am astonished at every one of you, ashamed of you, in fact, for failing to get me. I meant that you would be delighted—dee-light-ed—get me?—dee-light-ed.”
“Oh, I get you,” Helen Nash announced, lifting her hand over her head with an “I know, teacher,” attitude.
“Well, Helen, get up and speak your piece,” Katherine directed.
“You referred to the way Theodore Roosevelt shows his teeth when he says he’s ‘dee-light-ed’; but we got you wrong. When you said you would tell us something that would ‘Teddy Bear’ our teeth, you meant b-a-r-e, not b-e-a-r....