“Or change your spots and turn from a man-hater into a fiancée,” suggested Bob.
“That’s not changing your spots,” declared Mary wisely. “It’s just making up your mind, isn’t it, Babe?”
“How in the world did you know that, Mary Brooks?” demanded Babe in such awe-struck tones that her friends shrieked with laughter, and Dr. Hinsdale came out from his study to ask about the joke.
The girls had intended to leave early the next afternoon, but when Georgia Ames appeared, hovering in the Belden House hall, before dinner was over, and announced that she was giving a gargoyle party for them that evening, why of course there was nothing to do but insist that the gargoyle party should be a “small and early,” and rush to the station to countermand orders for carriages, and find out about making connections with sleepers at the junction.
“For we’re not so young as we were once,” said Roberta, hugging Betty. “We don’t have to be met at Harding by the registrar, and we may travel at night if we like, as long as two go one way and three the other.”
The gargoyle party was as mysterious as Mary Brooks’s historic hair-raising had been. Mary almost wept when Georgia asked her, and she was obliged to decline because of a previous dinner engagement—not to mention the dignity of her position. She solaced herself by making an elaborate costume for Eugenia Ford, a pretty little freshman who, when Georgia asked her to the party, thanked her gravely and explained that if gargoyles had anything to do with gargles she wouldn’t come, because she never could manage to do it—her throat must be queer. Most of the other guests professed hapless ignorance of what a gargoyle might be, but Georgia referred them easily to Bob’s cherished imp, which she had borrowed for the occasion, together with some post-cards of other grotesque figures.
“Just run in any time this afternoon, and look them over,” she urged, “and come in costume to-night, if you can. If not, it doesn’t matter. Mrs. Hinsdale is going to offer a prize for the best one, though.”
So the chosen few cast English Lit. papers and a possible—nay, probable—written review in Psych. to the winds, journeyed down-town to buy masks and draperies, and preëmpted all the desirable perches in Georgia’s room, marking them with big “Engaged” signs, which came loose when the wind blew in next time the door was opened, and gave the room a disconcerting air of having been snowed under, when Georgia got back to it just before tea.
“But we had to do it,” Eugenia Ford explained, as she helped Georgia put things to rights for the evening, “because the whole point of a gargoyle is that it stands somewhere. Lucile Merrifield said so. And the way you put on your costume makes a difference about where you are to sit. No, the other way around.”
“Conversely, you mean, my child,” amended Georgia, pleasantly, putting Mary’s five-pound box of Huyler’s on the chiffonier.