Betty made a wry face as she emptied her cup. “The trouble is the directions always say ‘the whole secret of success is in the cooking,’ and ‘one trial is a gross injustice,’” she quoted so solemnly that everybody laughed.
“Come and see the kitten eat her whipped cream,” begged Dorothy. “She gets it all over her little nose, and she hates to stop and wash it off. Besides, I think she ought to have more people than just Maggie and me at her party.”
So Betty went out to the kitchen to swell the numbers at the kitten’s party, and suddenly remembering Madeline’s neglected letter she slipped away to read it.
“Well, I’m coming back to my own, my native land,” Madeline wrote. “Father thinks he wants to sub-let the apartment in Washington Square. Of course he’ll jolly well change his mind before I get to New York, and then he’ll waste his substance cabling me frantically not to sub-let. And perhaps he and mother will come back too, later on. But I don’t mind coming along by myself. I’ve had enough of Italy and idleness. My head is full of tales that I want to get out of my system and into the magazines. I want to talk them over with Dick Blake. He’s a frightful cynic, and he’ll be sure to tell me that I can never make good. But he can’t stop me that way, not till I’ve sat on editors’ door-steps for a while and seen for myself.
“Incidentally here I am in London buying china madly for the tea-room—yours and mine and Babbie’s, that we planned last summer. The plans are so lovely that we’ve simply got to carry them out. I ‘elect’ us to do it. I’ve written Babbie to come and spend October with me and help at one of my famous house-cleanings. You must come too, and then we can discuss it—the tea-room, I mean. I should hate to hear my house-cleanings discussed. And if we don’t have the tea-room, the china will be adorable in the apartment. It’s a blue Canton kind, and I’m getting mostly double-decker bread-trays, and little toast-racks, and mustard pots—such fascinating squatty fat ones—and pepper grinders. If you were here, we’d hunt up an English cooking school and learn to make scones and bannocks and Bath buns. I’ve asked a queer little English woman in my boarding-house to give me the recipes. Perhaps you can make them out. I can cook only by taste, just as I can play only by ear; and the taste of scones and bannocks is as complicated as Wagner. I got your letter about being the family cook. It will be valuable experience for the tea-room.
“Come down early in October. Wire and I’ll meet you any day after the fourth, when my boat is supposed to come in. If either of you could get there sooner, it would be terribly jolly, because then you could meet me. The key to the house is at the tailor’s underneath, the cook left her new address on the mantle in a pink cloisonné jar, and she’ll bring the usual black cat for company while you wait.
“Yours en route,
“Madeline.”
Betty read it all through twice. It was so delightfully haphazard and cheerful and Bohemian. To-day was the twenty-sixth of September. It would be such fun to go to New York and share Madeline’s welcome home to Bohemia. Babbie would go, of course, and they would have famous parties to make use of the blue Canton mustard pots. And if they should really open a tea-room! For the first time since the launching of the economy program Betty winked back some real tears. Then she carefully turned out the lights in the dining-room, which Maggie never could remember about, and went back to the library to read the family her letter, as she always did when any of the Old Guard wrote to her. As Will said, the penalty of writing entertaining letters to Betty was that she felt under obligation to celebrate your epistolary ability by turning herself into a town-crier, and crying your bon mots from the house-tops.
And the very next morning came a scrap of a note from Babbie: