But Mrs. Merrill and Mary Jane couldn’t guess—they didn’t know anybody in Chicago to guess! Or at least they thought they didn’t.
“I saw—” began Alice slowly, for she wanted the fun of keeping them waiting to last as long as possible, “I saw—Frances Westland! And she goes to my school!”
“Why in the world didn’t we know that?” said Mrs. Merrill. “We should have guessed! Of course she goes to your school. I remember of thinking she wasn’t very far from us.”
“Can’t we have her come to see us?” asked Mary Jane eagerly.
“I already asked her if she couldn’t come,” explained Alice, “because I knew you’d want me to, and she says she’s sure she can. But she can’t come next Saturday because she and her auntie are going to Milwaukee to spend the week-end. But she thought she could come the next Saturday.”
“And that’s my birthday,” Mary Jane reminded her.
“I know it,” agreed Alice, “but I didn’t tell her. I just said I’d find out what we were doing that day and let her know this afternoon—was that all right, Mother?”
“You did exactly right, dear,” said Mrs. Merrill reassuringly. “Come right out to the dining-room now, because your soup is ready and you mustn’t hurry yourself too much with your lunch. While we eat, we’ll plan for the birthday.”
Of course there were many plans to be talked of, because in a big city there are so many kinds of things one may do. And it was awfully hard to decide which plan was the very most fun—you know how that is yourself. But after every plan that any of the three could think of had been discussed carefully, Mary Jane decided that there were two things she wanted the most to do. First, she wanted to stay home to celebrate and have a party and all that; and, second, she wanted to go down town and go to a big grown-up theater where there was music and lights and pretty things just like grown folks see up town. And for her part she admitted that she didn’t see how a person possibly, even on a birthday, could do those two conflicting things.
“Pooh!” laughed Mrs. Merrill, “that’s easy! I was telling Dad the other night that inasmuch as this was the first birthday in the city and on Saturday and everything—so convenient for us all—we’d better do those very two things.”