“Only a private view,” suggested Madeline, “which is not to be so much as mentioned until Babe gives the word.”
Meanwhile Babe, who had no serious doubts of the continued approval of her family—she had basked in it unquestioned ever since she could remember—wrote a long letter home and spent her last days in Paris in the garden with John and Virginie.
“You ought to be making a specialty of a trousseau,” Babbie told her severely. “May be you’re not going to be married for a whole year, but just the same there are lots of things you can get here much better than at home.”
But Babe refused to be diverted to shopping excursions. “I prefer fiancés for my dominant interest,” she said. “They’re much less wearing. Besides you’ve all given me such lovely engagement presents. My trousseau will have a Parisian touch from them.”
Mr. Jasper J. Morton was automobiling furiously through Germany. He wired Babe to remind her of the boat-race and to invite her whole party and John and Mr. Dwight to be his guests; but he gave no address, so John finally tore up the long letter he had written, deciding to tell his news in person when he and his father met in London.
A day or two after the going-away party Madeline appeared at breakfast in her traveling suit.
“My trunk has gone,” she announced, “and my carry-all-and-more-too is strapped as neatly as its bursting condition will permit. And the man servant has gone to hunt me a cab. Tell you sooner? If I had, you’d have persuaded me to stay a day longer. Don’t deny it, Betty Wales; I see it in your eye.”
“But you’ll be back in New York in time to start the tea-room?” inquired Babbie anxiously.
Madeline laughed. “If I don’t come, you may have all the ideas, Babbie dear, and I promise not to open a rival establishment. Father is thinking of a winter in Egypt, and I’ve ‘stayed put’ at Harding so long that it sounds very tempting indeed. But so does a tea-room. I’ll write you when I decide. Good-bye. No, I hate to have people come to the train with me.”
And Madeline was off on her long journey, blithely confident that each new experience in life is amusing, if only you expect it to be and waste no time in regretting such sad necessities as missing a Harvard-Cambridge race that you would give the world, if you had it, to see.