“What if it’s all a dream?” Rhoda asked as they lounged about on the day-bed and in the easy chairs. “What if we awaken tomorrow and find that none of it’s true, that it is as we thought when we planned the party in the first place? What if we find that only Nan is going after all?”
“That wouldn’t be a dream. That would be a nightmare,” Laura answered. “The thing I can’t understand is, how I managed to get in under the wire. I was never more surprised in all my life than I was when she read my name. Imagine me, the red-headed cyclone from nowhere, going to Europe. Even my well-known imagination fails at the prospect. I can believe some of my own stories quicker than this one that the powers that be have thought up. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. I never thought that I would live,” she said as though she was at least a hundred, “to see the day when I would admit that.”
“Nor did I either,” Nan said contentedly. How pleased she was that all her friends were going! “Remember the night we sat up like this in this very room and talked of going to Florida. We thought nothing could be so grand as that! Now the whole lot and caboodle of us,” she went on inelegantly, “are going on a little jaunt over to Europe.”
“Yes,” Laura laughed and tried to yawn, “it’s all in a day’s work.”
“The thing that tickles me,” Bess spoke up at last, she had been quite silent since the party, unable yet to accept the fact that she was, after all, going to Europe with her chum, “is the way Dr. Beulah kept my name until last. Did you see the twinkle in her eye when she finally read it off? I almost died of suspense when she said ‘Elizabeth’ and then hesitated for so long before she said ‘Harley’.”
“I did, too,” Nan said. “Really, Bess, if your name hadn’t been on that list with all the others I would have wept bitter tears with you. I don’t believe I could have gone without you.”
“Nan, do you mean that, honestly?” Bess asked.
“Honest and truly,” Nan reiterated. “But, girls,” she cried suddenly to them all, “there’s something I know that none of you do.”
“What is it?” they all chorused.
“Oh, I don’t know whether I ought to tell or not,” Nan teased.