Just then the agent arrived, Mary and Betty came back, and all four girls fired questions and suggestions at the poor man so fast and furiously that he lost his head and yielded every point, promising to shellac the whole interior, put up a stove that would “heat the place red-hot,” and carriage lamps with reflectors that would make it “blaze with light,” and a big fireplace at one end of the room, since Madeline declared it to be an absolute necessity. And he guaranteed to have the barn swept and garnished and ready for occupancy within ten days. Meanwhile the girls could install the kitchen fittings, and order their furniture.
“And engage a cook and decent waitresses,” added Mary portentously. “And if you do that in ten days I shall be green with envy.”
But Babbie did it, without, as she expressed it, lifting a little finger. She happened to meet Belden House Annie on the campus, and during their interview it developed that Annie had a pretty sister Nora, who would gladly come and be waitress, and an Aunt Bridget, who could “cook to the quane’s taste, or the prisidint’s.”
“We’ll have ‘quane’s’ style Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” suggested Madeline, “and ‘prisidint’s’ style the rest of the time. That is, if that idiotic carpenter ever gets the tables right.”
The carpenter, Madeline declared, was wearing her to a thread; but Babbie, who was pricking her pretty fingers hemming table-linen, and Betty, immersed in lists of pots and kettles, groceries and silverware, heartlessly refused to come to her rescue.
So Madeline relieved her mind by much grumbling, and in the intervals of her supervision developed new “features” with a joyous abandon that threatened to reduce the Hinsdales’ scholastic ménage to chaos. Dr. Hinsdale came home one afternoon to find his study darkened, the floor and table strewn with bits of multi-colored paper and paste-board, and Madeline, in a studio apron, trying the effect of her latest inspiration in candle-shades on the desk lamp.
“I’m going to make a different design for each stall,” she explained cheerfully, without looking up when the door opened. “That will be more interesting to make, and when a thing is interesting to make it’s more likely to turn out well, isn’t it now? Oh, I thought it was only Mary! I beg your pardon. I know I shouldn’t have come in here, but they had table-cloths and dish-towels spread around everywhere else. The first day it rains we’ll treat you to a free lunch, Dr. Hinsdale, to pay up. Oh, you’ve got—there’s some one else! Why didn’t you tell me?”
As Madeline fled precipitately, she heard “Prexy’s” pleasant laugh.
“We’re disgraced forever,” she announced tragically to the sewing-party. “Prexy will probably proclaim a boycott upon us at to-morrow’s chapel.”
But he sent word instead, by Professor Hinsdale, that he wanted to be counted in for the free lunch.