“You won’t, though, Bumble,” said Patty, laughing. “In the first place, you’ll forget to order your wedding gown until a day or two before the occasion, and of course it won’t be done. And then you’ll forget to send out the invitations, so of course you’ll have no guests. And I’m sure you’ll forget to invite the minister, so there’ll be no ceremony, anyway.”
Bumble laughed good-naturedly at this, for the helter-skelter ways of the Barlow family were well known to everybody.
“It would be that way,” she said, “if I looked after things myself, but I shall expect you, Patty, to take entire charge of the occasion, and then everything will go along like clockwork.”
“Are you staying long in Philadelphia, Miss Fairfield?” asked Ethel Banks, a Philadelphia girl, who lived not far from the Allens.
“A few days longer,” said Patty. “I have to go back to New York next Tuesday, and then no more gaiety for me. I don’t know how I shall survive such a sudden change, but after this mad whirl of parties and things, I have to come down to plain everyday studying of lessons,—but we won’t talk about that now; it’s a painful subject to me at any time, but especially when I’m at a party.”
“Me, too,” said Kenneth. “If ever I get through college, I don’t think I’ll want to see a book for the next twenty years.”
“I didn’t know you hated your lessons so, Kenneth,” said Marian. “I thought Patty was the only one of my friends who was willing to avow that she was like that ‘Poor little Paul, who didn’t like study at all.’”
“Yes, I’m a Paul too,” said Kenneth, “and I may as well own up to it.”
“But you don’t let it interfere with your work,” said Patty; “you dig just as hard as if you really enjoyed it.”
“So do you,” said Kenneth, “but some day after we have both been graduated, I suppose we’ll be glad that we did our digging after all.”