“You ought to let her in right away,” declared Betty loyally. “I was getting just dreadfully blue, with you and Babbie away, and first she thought of buckwheat griddle-cakes and then of this.”
“Yes, I’m the very Perfect Patron,” Mary chimed in eagerly, “and I ask you where any business would be without patrons? They’re as necessary as the firm, if not more so.”
Madeline stopped work to smile benignly at her. “Mary, the Perfect Patron,” she repeated, “your logic is irresistible. Your distinguished husband ought to be very proud of you. I’ll tell you what, Betty, I’ll make out a set of Rules for the Perfect Patron, and if Mary agrees to abide by them she shall be duly initiated with the rite of the Secret Drawer.”
“I agree to anything, if you’ll only show me that drawer right off,” begged Mary.
But Madeline was inexorable. “It is the present duty of the committee on Inspirations to see if it can copy this candle-shade,” she said. “And I may add that it is the duty of the Perfect Wife to be on time for meals. And the moral of that is——”
“Goodness gracious!” supplied Mary, who had been consulting a diminutive watch, and now rushed down the stairs murmuring sadly, “It must be fast, but I thought it was slow this morning.”
“I’m not at all sure that I can find that drawer again, myself,” Madeline confided to Betty, when they were alone. “It’s an awfully complicated arrangement.”
But that night just before they closed the tea-room, Madeline found the combination, after a little preliminary fumbling, and proudly entrusted to Betty the much-vaunted recipe for Aunt Martha’s cake.
“Let’s see.” She went over the formula. “First you press a spring that opens this panel. Then you pull out that drawer. There’s a second spring back of that, and a false bottom that comes up, and then a spring to open the secret drawer. I shan’t forget it again. The woman who sold the desk to me said she thought there was some way of working the whole combination at once, but I don’t believe there can be.”
“We mustn’t put anything in there if you’re ever going away again,” Betty declared, “for I never could get it out, unless you write down the rules for me.”