“She’ll never get out of that closet until we haul her out,” concluded Fluffy joyously. “Isn’t it going to be an extra-special initiation, Straight?”
Straight nodded in silence, reëxamined all the arrangements with polite attention to details, and departed, wearing the pained expression appropriate to one with a bad headache.
Five minutes later she was sitting cross-legged on Eugenia Ford’s couch, her cheeks still pale, but her eyes dancing with mirth and excitement.
“Of course I’m a loyal senior, and I ought by rights to be up-stairs with Fluffy helping the sophs,” she outlined her position rapidly. “But they’ve got enough help without me, and the racket did bother me fearfully, and made me mad, and besides, the juniors’ Rescue party that I’m going to organize will be a grand feature, so they really ought to thank me for seeming to bother them. How many juniors are there in the house, Eugenia? Well, Timmy Wentworth counts against two of the sophs, because she’s so big, and that big corner double room she and Sallie Wright have is the very best place in the house for our extra-special show. Now where can we borrow masks and black dominos? I have an idea that raw oysters dipped in hot chocolate sauce would taste rather weird. They never have had uncanny eats at the initiations I’ve been to, so that will be an original stroke. You go tell the others and buy the oysters and borrow chocolate and find the clothes and get the night watchman to lend you a lot of rope. I’ll take a nice little nap here on your couch, away from that sophomore racket, and at five we all round up in Timmy’s room to arrange.”
Having thus relieved herself of all minor details, after a fashion taught her by her good friend Madeline Ayres, Straight curled up among Eugenia’s downy pillows, and slept sweetly and very soundly until Eugenia and Timmy Wentworth shook her awake with the information that there were not enough black dominos and it was quarter past five.
The Belden House juniors appeared at dinner that night late and rather disheveled. Straight, because she had a headache, did not appear at all, and thereby missed seeing Montana Marie sweep through the Belden House parlors between the triumphant Susanna and Fluffy Dutton, the latter not too much worried about her twin’s unprecedented indisposition to miss any of the humors of the situation. For Susanna and her friends, being rather tired and hurried, and wishing also to be suitably clothed for darkling adventures in Susanna’s closet, had not dressed very formally for dinner. Against their background of shirt-waists and walking skirts or plain little muslins, Montana Marie sparkled radiantly in a clinging, trailing yellow satin, cut low enough to show the lovely curves of her throat and long enough to give just a glimpse of her high-heeled gold slippers and to lend her a quite sumptuous dignity among her short-skirted companions. A jeweled fillet held her piled-up hair in the exaggerated mode of the moment—it was becoming to Montana Marie. Diamonds sparkled at her throat and on her fingers. In short, Montana Marie was perfectly dressed for twenty-two and a formal dinner,—but not for a school-girl nor for any little after-dinner surprise in the way of an extra-special initiation party.
“It would be tragic to have to jump off a spring-board in those clothes,” Fluffy whispered sadly to a sophomore neighbor. “We’ll have to manage somehow to dress her over for the part.”
“She’s about my size; she can take my white linen with the braided trimming,” the sophomore agreed magnanimously. “It’s rather dirty, I’m sorry to say, but that’s really an advantage for to-night.”
“I’ll tell Susanna,” promised Fluffy, “and she’ll have to arrange. Why in the world didn’t she tell Miss Montana Marie O’Toole not to dress up like a princess?”
But Susanna, though she employed all her far-famed diplomacy, could not “arrange” any changes in her guest’s wonderful toilette. When she proposed a little walk in the rain, and said it would be a shame to risk spoiling that lovely dress, Montana Marie only smiled, and picked up her train.