“Not Nora,” said Betty stoutly. “I’m going to do the table myself, and I shall stay on in the kitchen during dinner to make sure that things are sent in looking right. Emily Davis will attend to that part later, but for this first time——”
“You are scared to death,” cried Babbie triumphantly. “But you needn’t be. It will be a howling success, that dinner. I feel it in my bones. And when Miss Raymond is pleased, she is very, very pleased. It will be the making of the Tally-ho Catering Department, Betty Wales, and I shall write Mother that you are the boldest and most fearless caterer in the whole country, and that she’d better engage you for our wedding without further delay.”
Betty laughed. “What you will really do without delay, Miss Hildreth, is to advise me about the flowers for the table, and the place-cards. Of course, for such a terribly intellectual party, our usual Tally-ho ideas are all out of the way.”
Babbie nodded thoughtfully. “Of course. She wants a perfectly dignified dinner. Keynote: expensive simplicity. Roses in a tall glass vase, and place-cards engraved with her family crest if she has one. Color scheme depending upon her china. Or has Celine smashed so much china that we shall have to use ours? You’ll have to conciliate the autocratic Celine, Betty; so you’d better be brushing up your French in your idle moments.”
“Don’t bother with French, but take me on your preliminary scouting trip,” amended Madeline. “I have yet to discover the fat foreign cook that I can’t conciliate. I love them so, that I instantly win their foolish hearts.”
The scouting trip disclosed the fact that Celine was good-natured, if set in her ways. Also, she had not smashed any of the gold and white Raymond-heirloom china. Instead she kept it under lock and key, and Miss Raymond and Fräulein Wendt were compelled to be satisfied with a plebeian, modern blue and white set purchased by command of the thrifty Celine, who had an obsession to the effect that some day Miss Raymond would marry and have a real home of her own. For this happy consummation Celine insisted upon hoarding the ancestral silver, china, and mahogany, sternly refusing to waste what she shrewdly recognized as real treasures upon this make-believe, makeshift housekeeping, divided between a drab little German lady and a distrait and absent-minded professor in petticoats, whom Celine adored and scolded by turns.
“And for ze grand partie, it is all as you wish,” she assured Betty magnificently. “It will do them gut—dis grand partie. I will make food for ze god, mam’selle, chust as you wish. Ze mam’selle, she is busy to-day—no count to disturb. She say do as ze little mam’selle wish, and all goes well. Voilà!”
So Babbie bought long-stemmed yellow roses, and borrowed Mary’s tallest and slenderest wedding-present vase to put them in. And when Betty demurred a little at the formidable price of engraved crests, Madeline painted the design in red and gold. Then, to amuse herself, she made another set of Tally-ho-ish cards with clever, flippant pictorial take-offs of the guests as decoration, and below leading questions, “just to start the good talk going,” she mimicked Miss Raymond gaily.
“I’d like to plan the great Mr. Joram a dinner,” she declared, “a real live American-college-girl dinner, that would make him sit up and like us all. I say, Betty, wouldn’t Miss Raymond stand for a little gleam of originality?”
Betty considered, looking troubled. “Of course those cards are terribly clever, and she might like them, but—if she didn’t——”