Three Blind Dates

Book excerpt: Katy Ellis is fed up with Helen Woods' eternal bragging about her brother's popularity and social graces. Where the shoe really pinches is that Katy's brother George, is about the most unsocial chap alive. Completely absorbed in scientific experiments, George, away for the first year of college, is as impervious to women as an iron post is to BB shot. With a perseverance born of despair, Katy lays her plans for George's summer vacation at home. She spreads the news among her girl acquaintances that George has undergone a miraculous change in attitude toward girls; has, in fact, become a veritable man-about-town. To set the stage for George's triumphal return, Katy--with the help of three eager confederates--gives George's colorless room the college treatment in a big way. Athletic equipment is everywhere in evidence; girls' pictures clutter up the landscape; even Dave Ellis's pipes (Dave is George's father) are appropriated in order to give the room a mannish air. Deep down in Katy's ambitious little heart, of course, is the gnawing fear that George will blow up when he finds out the trick--blow up like some of the stuff he works with in his darling laboratory. George is, unquestionably, all that Helen Woods says he is: a dim bulb. Socially, that is. Will Katy be able to make him live up to the reputation she has manufactured for him? That's the problem ... and therein lies most of the plot.