“We just want to show you as many of the dear places we love to visit as possible,” said Katherine, crossing her arms on the back of the seat Mrs. Moore occupied. “We could never walk to more than one, but with the machine you can see a number. Only you mustn’t suppose that we have machines when we see them. No, indeed, we walk or we hire a nice old poky horse and runabout from the livery stable. The horse may be almost an extinct animal in other places, but he’s still a great favorite up here.”
Thus she was whirled along the river road, through their favorite picnic spots, from hamlet to hamlet while tea-house after tea-house flashed into view and were pointed out with accompanying tales of affectionate or funny reminiscences by the Hampton girls.
At one, a large and ugly cat was always to be expected at every party. The woman who ran the tea-house had taken for her motto, “Love me, love my cat,” and its baleful green eyes watched hungrily every mouthful that passed through the patrons’ lips.
Doris remembered an afternoon when she and Gloria and the great Mary Marvington, of the Junior class, had taken tea there, and Gloria had unwittingly put her foot on the cat’s tail under the table, the cat howled, and Gloria sat stonily, her face white, trying to think what that awful sound could be.
“The cat wouldn’t stop howling, of course, because Gloria didn’t lift her foot, and Mary Marvington was in hysterics, so I leaned under the table and removed poor Gloria’s foot from the poor cat’s tail, and I think old Tabby is running yet.”
Lilian, Katherine and Peggy screamed with delight at Doris’ very much embellished story.
Mrs. Moore’s eyes were sparkling now, and she almost had to pinch herself to realize that she was, for the first time in her life, in college.
When Jim set them down outside the big recitation hall, where she was actually to attend class with Peggy, she smoothed her coat with happy anticipation, and perhaps the full wonder of Thirteen came to this shabby little woman, with grey in her hair, as radiantly as it came twice a week to these Hampton girls, who picked up snatches of everything under the sun, and who learned without the miserable grind, an easy style of writing that set them apart from the girls who had never had Thirteen.
“If all their classes are like this,” thought Mrs. Moore, “I should think they’d rave in their letters about the school part of it more than anything else.”
But alas! Their classes all like that! Only one was like it. The others were too apt to be nightmares of mathematics or agonies of Greek tragedy and Lyric poets or merciless written lessons in medieval history.