“I am much interested in your wedding,” went on Mrs. Wright, riveting her attention on Mary Louise. “In fact I am going to put off our going to the lake for a few days so that we will be able to attend. I am deeply disappointed not to be making Elizabeth’s bridesmaid’s dress myself, but since it was decided Mrs. Barlow was to make them all, of course, I had to give way to her. At least, I can have the satisfaction of making dresses for my other girls.”
“Oh—yes—of course!” Mary Louise managed to say. “I’ll be so glad to have you stay over.”
With a triumphant swoop Mrs. Wright gathered together her four daughters and ushered them out of the shop and down the dusty stairs. She was so delighted that her superior management had drawn from Mary Louise an invitation for her entire family to the highly desirable wedding reception that she forgot all about making a point about taking Elizabeth home for luncheon.
“I hate to leave her,” she said, after Pauline reminded her of her remissness, “but one can’t manage everything at once.”
“No?” questioned Margaret with a rising inflection that might have been taken for impertinence by her mother had she not been taken up with gazing at an automobile full of young men stopping in front of the ramshackle building where the Higgledy-Piggledy Shop was coming into being.
“How do you do, Mr. Dexter?” she said graciously, as the young man who was driving the car raised his hat.
“I believe my soul they are going up to the shop,” she said with some irritation to her daughters. “And what are those things they are carrying? Why, it is plumbing! There is a bath tub and pipes right in the car with them. And look! The car behind them, also full of young men, is bringing a gas stove.”
“And there is Billy McGraw driving a lumber wagon!” exclaimed Gertrude.
Billy McGraw was known as the richest young man in Dorfield, the richest and the best dressed, and to see him in khaki trousers, evidently left over from his recent army experience, and olive drab sweater on top of a load of lumber was too much for the curiosity of the Wrights.
“What can it mean?” wondered Annabel.