CHAPTER XV
"THE GATES AJAR"
Commencement is over, the good-byes are said and most of the girls have departed for home. Babe and I leave this morning at ten 'clock when Mrs. Waldon's machine is to come for us and take us to her apartment for a week's visit. Babe is included in the invitation because she can't go home till I do. Her family won't let her travel alone, although she's nineteen, a year and a month older than I.
Father wasn't willing for Barby to leave this country, so she went into the Army and Navy League work with Mrs. Waldon, the first month she was here. But now she's at the head of one of the departments in the Red Cross and will be in Washington all summer, and longer if necessary. I've finished my Book of Second Chronicles and shall leave it for her to read whenever she can find an opportunity. But I'm keeping my Memoirs out of my trunk till the last moment, because there's something I want to write in it about Babe.
It was agreed that nobody was to wear flowers at Commencement, and we asked our families not to send any, so it was generally understood that there was to be no display of any kind. But yesterday an enormous florist box arrived for Babe Nolan. If she hadn't been so mysterious about it we wouldn't have thought anything of it. Any one of us would have opened it right then and there in the hall, and passed it around to be sniffed and admired. But she got as red as fire and, grabbing the box, hurried into her room with it and shut the door. That's the last anybody saw of it. A little later when I had occasion to go to her room there wasn't a sign of a flower to be seen, not even the box or a piece of string. The girls all thought it was queer they should disappear so absolutely, and wondered why she didn't put them in the dining-room or the chapel if she didn't want them in her own room, and they teased her a good deal about her mysterious suitor.
But last night, after Lillian and Jessica had started to the train, she called me to her room and threw open the wardrobe door with a tragic gesture, and asked me what on earth she was to do with that. Her trunk wouldn't hold another thing, and she supposed she'd have to go all the way to the Cape with it in her two hands, and it smelled so loud of tuberoses and such things she was afraid people would think she was taking it to a funeral.
There on the wardrobe flood stood a floral design fully three feet high, that looked exactly as if intended for a funeral, for it was one of those pieces called "Gates Ajar." I didn't dare laugh because Babe stood there looking so worried and so deeply in earnest that I knew she'd be offended if I did. I suggested simply leaving it behind, or taking out the flowers and chucking the wire frame into the ash can. Then I saw my advice was unacceptable. Evidently she hadn't told me all, and didn't intend to for fear I'd laugh at the person who sent such a design.