"How big?" demanded Judith, still thinking of the farms she had seen in Ontario and Quebec.
"We had twenty-five thousand acres last year, but Dad has leased another ten thousand on the other side of the river. Oh, Judy, my dear, if ever you come to the West I'll show you what real fun is! Sometimes I ride all day—and such riding! I've a gem of a little mare—Patsy's her name—she's as good a chum as I ever had until I came here last year. Aren't mothers bricks?" she added with a little catch in her voice. "Mother really needs me, but she just insisted on my coming—she taught me in her spare time until I came here last year, and because spare time wasn't plentiful there are big gaps in what I know, and as I'm stupid to begin with, the lessons sometimes seem so hard that I just want to give up and run home. But of course I'm not going to," she finished, laughing at Judith's sober face; "that would be a poor way to say 'thank you' to my blessed little mother. What are you going to be to-night?"
"A Colonial lady from Virginia," answered Judith superbly.
"Good—isn't that funny? I'm going to be be a Virginian Colonel. Let's be partners. Molly was to be mine, but she certainly can't go with a sprained ankle. We'd better get busy—there isn't much time left." And Josephine disappeared into her own cubicle where Judith could hear her opening and closing drawers and singing in her funny boyish voice their new nonsense song:
"Of all the ships that sail on land,
There's none like 'Jolly Susan.'
Her crew works well with heart and hand,
And sometimes they're amusin'."
Sally May and Jane whirled into the "Jolly Susan" like small hurricanes in time to sing the verse over again, and then the snatches of talk she could hear told Judith that her neighbours were thoroughly enjoying the fascinating business of dressing up, and had evidently forgotten all about her.
Perhaps it was a little reaction after several weeks of new and exciting experiences; perhaps Josephine's reference to mothers being "bricks"; whatever it was Judith felt lonely and homesick. She didn't know how to make her costume; she didn't think of Sally May, and she hated to confess to Josephine—to whom, it must be confessed, she had always felt a little superior—that she hadn't a ghost of a notion how to make, out of nothing at all, the dress of a Virginian lady of fashion.
But although Josephine had convulsed the class and enraged Madame Phillippe by translating hors de combat as "war-horse," and although her ideas as to angles and triangles were so hazy as to be of no service to her in a geometry class, she was not at all stupid where her fellow humans were concerned, and she had seen the quickly restrained quiver on Judith's lips when mothers were mentioned.
"I guess she's homesick and doesn't know it," said Josephine to herself. "I'd better buck her up a bit and give her a good time." But because she had a generous admiration of Judith's cleverness she never thought of offering her any suggestions as to how to put her costume together.
A little later she appeared in Judith's doorway in black tights, blue silk stockings, buckled shoes (cardboard buckles covered with silver paper), a white shirt blouse buttoned high, and a long black ribbon in her hand.