"Whenever I hear of anything that is absolutely all right," Rebecca Mary explained, "I seem to see it as the most lovely rose color. And so I always think of absolutely all right things as pink. How lucky it is for us that you owe the Mifflin Bank a call."
"It's lucky for me," insisted Richard with a smile.
So on Saturday Richard brought his big car to Rebecca Mary's door, and Joan and Rebecca Mary ran down from the window where they had been watching for him for hours. Rebecca Mary wore another portion of Aunt Ellen's gift, a new motor coat—to tell the truth it was the only motor coat she had ever had—and a fascinatingly small hat demurely veiled. She looked just exactly right for a motor trip, and Richard told her so with his eyes while Granny, who was already in the tonneau, admired her with her lips as well as her eyes.
"That's a very smart and becoming coat and hat, Rebecca Mary," she said at once. "Suppose you sit in front with Richard? Riding in an open car always makes me sleepy and if you are back here you will talk to me and keep me awake."
"Won't I talk to you?" Joan didn't know how she was going to keep from talking all the way from Waloo to Mifflin, but she obediently nestled down beside Granny.
"I rather think you will." Granny smiled at her and patted her fat little hand. "But before you begin to talk you must help me plan how we shall persuade Mrs. Wyman to loan us her daughter. That will take a lot of thinking, and you can't talk very well while you are thinking."
On the front seat Rebecca Mary laughed joyously. "It sounds as if this was going to be a very important expedition," she said.
"It is," Richard told her with a flash of his eyes. "All ready? Quite comfortable?"
And when Rebecca Mary had said she was quite ready and comfortable he took the seat beside her and did something to buttons and levers and they were off.
Rebecca Mary felt like one of the princesses Joan talked about so intimately as they rolled down the street, through the suburbs and into the real country. Richard called her attention to this old house, a relic of pioneer days, or to that new public library, and to the white sign boards which told them that they were on the Jefferson Highway. The name was between a palmetto and a towering pine to show them that New Orleans was at one end and that Minnesota was at the other end of that ribbon-smooth road. Richard seemed to know the way and there was nothing which Rebecca Mary should have seen which he did not show her.