“Oh!” ejaculated the startled lady. “He—he is a boy.”
“And I am a girl,” Beth laughed. “But I think I have just as much ambition as any boy.”
The lady laughed too, and said:
“That brings me to the reason I had for hailing you, my dear. Now that Larry is home for good I want to give him a nice party. The young folk of Hudsonvale, I am afraid, have almost forgotten him. And, too, he is ambitious to take his father’s place in the community as a lawyer. We must introduce him to the older generation likewise. So, when we were talking it over this morning, he remembered you and told me to be sure to invite ‘that little Baldwin girl.’ Why!” and Larry’s mother laughed easily, as though she did not know she had conveyed a sting, “he will scarcely know you, you have grown so.”
“How kind of him to remember me,” Beth said sweetly.
“Oh, Larry has always looked upon you as a little sister, I fancy—having been denied any of his own. Now, you will come, of course? Next Tuesday evening. There will be dancing.”
Mrs. Haven had managed to make Beth feel that she was being patronized; but the girl was too sensible to take offence. She believed Larry had really said that he wanted her at his party, and she would not disappoint her old playfellow.
“I will surely come, Mrs. Haven. Thank you,” she said, as the lady’s car started.
As Beth told her mother when she arrived home with the eggs, she had nothing but her graduation dress to wear to Larry’s “coming out” party, as Beth laughingly designated it, and that frock had been made with the view to its being her “best-Sunday-go-to-meeting” attire for two years to come. A new dress was an event in the Baldwin household.
“It’s not just the thing for an evening party, Mamma,” she said cheerfully. “But we’ll make it do.”