“As if that had anything to do with it,” Babe sniffed. “Besides, we’re not going to be married for a year. You may all be married before that—Helen Chase Adams may be.”
Then Mary suddenly discovered that the girls had some trunks with them, and she insisted upon seeing their foreign trophies immediately. So Bob pulled the drift-wood fire to pieces and the other girls locked doors and hunted Mary’s wraps, while Mary scribbled a note of explanation to her husband.
“I’ve said we’d be back here for supper,” she told them. “Roberta ought to come at nine-thirty and she’s sure to be hungry for gingersnaps.”
On the way they met and annexed Lucile Merrifield and Polly Eastman, who invited them to sit with the seniors in chapel next morning, offered them their choice between dinner at Cuyler’s or the Belden, whose matron, they declared, would be “pleased as punch” to have such distinguished guests, and reproached Mary hotly for not being willing to conspire against the ten o’clock rule by inviting them to join her supper party.
“And the moral of that,” said Mary sadly, “is that only sedate persons with no wicked little friends in college ought to marry Harding professors. I hope you’ll remember that before it’s too late, children, and not fall in love with one. And I hereby invite Lucile, Polly and Georgia to dinner the very first night I have a cook.”
It was great fun going through the trunks, but it took a long time, because Mary was constantly being reminded of desert island experiences, which in turn suggested fresh-air child anecdotes to Bob, and they got back to Europe again only to be switched off on to Harding news by Lucile or Georgia. But by running most of the way they managed to meet Roberta’s train,—which is Harding style, because one never has time there to waste on an early start.
And after supper, which was also Harding style, the stay-at-homes promised to be quiet and give the travelers a chance to tell their adventures, and Dr. Hinsdale considerately retired to his study so that the talk also might be strictly Harding style.
When she had listened breathlessly to the details of the “real adventure,” and to snatches of all the others, Mary smiled her “beamish smile” around the circle. “Well,” she said, “you’ve all lived up to your Harding reputations, as far as I can see—Babbie the Butterfly, Madeline the Bohemian, Betty a Benevolent Adventurer.”
“And the moral of that is,” put in Babbie quickly, “what you are at home, that you will be abroad.”
“Unless you drop all your individuality and become a Tourist, with a capital T,” added Roberta.