“You know me, Peggy,” hinted the owner of the contribution. “I’m fudge hungry, too. What time is the happiness?”
“When you’re invited you’ll find out,” retorted Peggy, hurrying off with the alcohol and humming a little tune.
When the girls went in to dinner a mysterious whisper went round. It was “Save your butter, and ask for two helps.”
The butter balls remained untouched on each of ten plates as a result, and were finally gathered together very surreptitiously onto one plate just before the dishes were cleared for dessert. Under the auspices of Peggy this one dish was covered with a saucer and sneaked down into the folds of her napkin.
When the sauce that they invariably had for dinner on this night of the week was set before them with a general dish of granulated sugar to make it sweet enough, she pointed toward the sugar bowl and several of the girls looked miserable, because sugar is an awfully hard thing to take away unobserved.
But tea was served, and three of the girls asked for just cups and saucers because they liked to fix theirs up themselves, they would put in the sugar and cream and would then pass them for the tea to be poured in. But the empty cups safe in their possession, they each asked earnestly for the sugar, and slowly and painstakingly, talking all the time so as to divert attention, they shoveled in spoonful after spoonful until the cup was full. Then with a sigh of relief at a difficult duty well done, they sank limply back in their chairs, only being sure to remember to be passing something when any of the waitresses approached, so that their hands would cover the too-sweet tea-cups with nothing in but sugar.
“Won’t you have some wafers?” Florence Thomas would ask Helen Remington in a worried voice every now and then, lifting the plate and offering it to her solicitously. Of course, the girls weren’t sitting at Mrs. Forest’s table this week, or it never could have been managed and they would not have thought of trying. But just by themselves it wasn’t impossible. When dinner was over and their principal and the teachers had moved toward the drawing room, they, with wild sidelong looks and terrified glances this way and that, sniggering conversation that didn’t mean anything, gathered up their trophies, hugging them as close as might be, and covering them with folds of satin gown and little nervous hands. Then, following, wherever possible, some girl who was going uprightly forth with nothing that she shouldn’t have, the little guilty procession filed out and rushed for the stairs, stumbling and laughing in their haste and leaving, all unnoticed by them, a tiny tell-tale trail of sugar up the broad varnished stairs.
All these savings were taken to the room where Peggy and Katherine lived, and then the girls went their separate ways serenely, some to study and some to bed, each knowing that she would be summoned at the proper time to partake of the fruit of her spoils.
“What shall we do, are we sleepy or do we want to sit up a while and talk?” Peggy and Katherine, the hostesses-to-be, consulted each other. It was characteristic that they used the plural, for it always happened that they were either both sleepy or both wide awake.
“Well,” Katherine suggested, after a few moments of deliberation, “I say that we tuck all up with nice soft quilts and talk. We can talk about the Huntingtons and how mean Mrs. Forest is sometimes, and—and everything, until it’s time to start the chafing-dish and call the girls.” “Midnight” didn’t mean the stroke of twelve to them at all. It was any time in the late, late hours, along about half-past ten or eleven, say.