"True. How shall we manage that?"
"Send a groom instantly with invitations to the Hastings, the Leslies, and the De Veres, and the Cuppaidges. I am positive they are all dying of ennui this moment, and will hail with rapture any chance of escape from it. They will all come; and the Leslies have two or three really very presentable young men staying with them."
"Yes, that will be best. Dora, will you go and write the notes for me? Now, would it not be a good thing to exclude all the non-players from our council?"
"Oh," says Harriet, "then I must go."
"No, no, Harry, we can't do without you," cry I, imploringly; "you must stay. We could not get on without some head to guide us and soothe down disappointed actors. You shall be wardrobe-woman and chief secretary and prime minister and stage manager all in one."
"Yes," says Bebe, who has got herself into the ancient robe by this; "and head-centre and peacemaker, and all that sort of thing. Now, don't I look sweet in this flowered gown? Ah! what interesting creatures our great-great-grandmothers must have been! It almost makes me long to be a great-great-grand mother myself."
"But your salary—your salary: state your terms," says Harriet. "I cannot be all that you have mentioned for nothing."
"For love, dearest: call you that nothing?" replies Bebe, as she struts up and down before a long glass.
Presently darling mother, who has slept at Strangemore and breakfasted in her room, comes creeping in, and a dispute arises as to whether she must be excluded from the cabinet and sent into exile until night reveals our secrets. But she is so amused at everything, and has grown so young and gay in the absence of her bugbear, that we make an exception in her favor also; and, as she has a real talent for dressing people, and would have made an invaluable ladies' maid, had her lot been cast so low, we find her very useful later on.
The invitations are despatched, and acceptances from all brought back; every one, it appears, will be delighted to come and witness our success or failure, as the case may be. These polite replies cause us faint pangs of consternation largely tinctured with timidity, making us conscious that we are regularly in for something: that much is expected of us; and that, after all, the performance may prove "flat, stale, and unprofitable."