The Detective Club

Now, I am going to tell this exactly as it happened and then you can decide whether you think Betty Bliss was a clever detective or not. It began in Betty's living room right here in Westcote, and there were five of us in it. I was there my name is Madge and of course Betty was there, and so was Dorothy Carter. The two boys were Dick Prince who lives next door to Betty, and Arthur Dane who lives next beyond Dick. We all live in the same neighborhood and in Tenth Street, so we had formed the Tenth Street Reading Circle, and we were reading detective mystery stories together. One of us read a chapter, and then another read a chapter, and so on. So this evening we were reading the last of The Mystery of the Golden Puffin, which is a pretty good story, and Betty Bliss said, "I'd love to be a detective. All my life I've wanted to be a detective." This was so. I remembered when Betty coaxed me to go with her to see Mr. Cassidy, the Chief of Detectives in Westcote, and he told us a lot of things about detecting, and Betty said then she wished she could be a detective. "Yes," I said, "and I remember when Mr. Cassidy put the handcuffs on us. I was glad when he took them off again." "But he did say girls could be detectives when they grew up," Betty said. "There are lots of women detectives." "Women, maybe," said Dick Prince scornfully. "But a lot of good, girl detectives would be!" "How do you know?" Betty Bliss demanded. "Just because there never have been any girl detectives, you say that. I'll tell you what would be fun," she went on in the enthusiastic way she sometimes does. "A Detective Club. To do real detecting. Just the five of us." "Not for me," said Dick Prince who thinks he is smart. "I don't go into any detective club with girls. If it came to real detecting, you girls would make a mess of it." "All right, then," said Betty Bliss, tossing her head, "you boys needn't come in! We girls will be the Detective Club. We'll make it a sort of Scotland Yard, Madge, like the one in London. I'll be Superintendent, and you and Dot can be Inspectors." "We'd better not call it Scotland Yard," Dot said. "If we solve a lot of cases and get to be famous all over the world, we wouldn't want anybody to think we were the London Scotland Yard, and give that Scotland Yard the credit, would we?"

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