Mrs. Hildreth smiled faintly. “I have a chance, haven’t I, since Babe’s mother and Betty’s father have both had to give up meeting the boat, and John and his father are in Boston. How shall I do it, daughter? What is the most effective method of sprucing up storm-tossed collegians?”
“Send them to Harding to recuperate for a day or two,” answered Babbie with suspicious promptness. “The freshman rains will be just over and Mary’s house will be settled, and it will be simply scrumptious seeing her and Georgia Ames and everybody, won’t it, girls?”
“Rather,” agreed Babe. “We could wire Roberta to meet us there, and give her her gargoyle and Mary her Flemish lamp. That would be a great saving of expressage.”
“And we could display Babe, the tamed and affianced man-hater,” laughed Betty. “Only—I’m in a dreadful hurry to get home.”
“What’s a day?” demanded Babbie. “We can run up this afternoon. Bob’s going to be at the boat, and we’ll drag her along as a beautiful impromptu feature. Honestly, I don’t think you girls ought to start on a long journey west without getting rested a little; it would make you horribly land-sick. Wouldn’t it, mother?”
“It might,” admitted Mrs. Hildreth, smilingly. “But seriously, girls, I meant to treat you all to a side-trip to one of Babbie’s adored villages, and we stayed on in Paris so long that I lost my opportunity. So if you’d like to substitute Harding, I want you all to go as Babbie’s guests.”
“I was just going to say that I hadn’t any money,” Babe explained smilingly. “I shall have just exactly a quarter left after I’ve paid my steamer fees. But when the mail comes I shall have enough for my ticket home, because I told father to send it. And I thought possibly that knowing me he might put in something extra,” she added hopefully.
“You could have borrowed of me,” Betty told her proudly. “I’m so pleased to think that I can give father back my whole ‘emergency fund,’ as he called the extra that he gave me to have in case I needed it. Nan always spends her emergency fund; she says it attracts emergencies instead of keeping them away. But I didn’t quite know whether you could honestly call a trip to Harding an emergency or not.”
“You don’t have to,” put in Babbie summarily. “You’re to call it an adorable little out-of-the-way village. Now who packed the gargoyles for Bob and Roberta, and where is Mary’s lamp? You two be thinking while I find the purser and borrow a time-table of Harding trains.”
So it happened that the three travelers, reinforced by Bob Parker and Georgia Ames, dined sumptuously at Cuyler’s and invaded the Hinsdale mansion in time to catch Mary, enveloped in a big gingham apron, washing dishes.