“Bother!” Madeline took her up. “They’ll jump at it—the freaks particularly, because they don’t get in on such gay doings very often. Now, Betty, don’t you worry about my helping on the ‘extra-special’ order-list. I was afraid Mr. Thayer would be scared off if I explained that I meant to dump all the finishing touches on the left-over girls. They can make the costumes, too, Wednesday night and Thursday.”
“If he knew you better, he would have been sure that you’d never bother with any finishing touches yourself,” Babbie remarked crushingly.
“How can you expect a person who has such splendid ideas to bother with fussy little details?” put in Betty, who had listened in wondering admiration to Madeline’s offhand suggestions. “I’m sure the college girls will like to help. The only trouble is, if they do most of the work who ought to have the hundred dollars?”
“What hundred dollars?” chorused the other two, and Betty explained that the financial side of the Tally-ho’s biggest order was being entirely overlooked.
“It ought not to be put in with the tea-room profits, except the bill for the refreshments,” Babbie declared, “and I certainly ought not to have any of it. I shan’t be any help. You and Madeline can divide, because you made friends with him first, and she thought up the entertainment.”
“But if the others sew for us——” began Betty.
“Oh, let’s wait and see how it comes out,” Madeline suggested easily, slipping on her ulster. “You two can be planning Twelfth Night cakes for refreshments, while I’m gone. Did you ever see them in London, Babbie? They’re fearfully and wonderfully concocted.”
At the door she came back to make another suggestion. “All big businesses have their pet charities. We might have the stocking people for ours. We could just ask Mr. Thayer to pay the expenses, and make him spend the rest of the money for a club-house—well, keep it toward a club-house then, Miss Betty the practical.”
Next morning Madeline came back from her visit to the factory more enthusiastic, if possible, than before. She had talked to the Italian boy with the bandaged arm—he came down every day to have it dressed by the company’s doctor—and he was from Sorrento and knew her father, had posed for him once in the olive orchard behind the villa. Even Babbie had been interested in the children, Italians, French, Poles, Bohemians, Greeks, dark-eyed, swift-fingered, chattering eagerly to “da pretta lada” in broken English, and all agog over the mysterious Christmas party.
“They live all together down there somewhere.” Babbie pointed vaguely off behind the kitchen. “They were nearly all brought over to this country three years ago, when the factory was opened. It’s a real foreign quarter, Mr. Thayer says, with old-country customs and pitiful poverty and ignorance. It’s queer that we never knew anything about them, isn’t it? The college is on that hill, and the factory on this, and yet they’re so far apart that one has hardly heard of the other.”