Betty opened the hall door and went ahead through the wide hall. “Hang your coats and things here in the closet,” she cried, taking off her overshoes, “and come on up to the nursery. We can have it all to ourselves.”
Elsa’s eyes shone with pleasure as she looked around the hospitable hall and at the huge fireplace where a bright fire burned. She always felt the homelikeness of the Whites’ house the moment she came into it. It was so unlike her grandmother’s house, where everything was stiff and stately.
Elsa especially loved the nursery, Betty’s bedroom and playroom, for it had picture-paper of children resting under trees and of wandering brooks which led to other children and other trees; it had also a broad window-shelf filled with bright-blossoming geraniums, and above, a cage with three tiny East Indian strawberry-birds; and—best of all to Elsa—a row of dolls, large and small, on a long, chintz-covered window-seat between Betty’s blue-and-white bed on one side and her dolls’ house on the other. Indeed, Elsa loved Betty’s room quite as much as Betty herself did.
Alice had never been in the room before. “O, what dear, lovely birds!” she exclaimed, clasping her dimpled hands and looking up with round, surprised eyes at the three mites of birds, brown with red spots, red eyes and red beaks, and legs so thin and needle-like as to seem scarcely strong enough to support even the tiny bodies.
“They are the dearest things,” said Betty enthusiastically. “Uncle John brought them to me from India. I am glad there are three of them, because if one dies there will be two left.”
“But what if two die?” asked Alice anxiously.
That, however, Betty did not want to think of, so she said hurriedly: “Come on, let’s decide about the club.”
“What shall we name it?” asked Elsa, who had settled herself on the soft rug by the bedside, with one elbow on the window-seat so that she could better look at the dolls.
“The Friday Club,” suggested Betty, who was sitting at the foot of the bed.
“I like ‘Club of Three,’” said Alice, turning away from the strawberry birds with a little sigh of happiness.