“Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know. I’m to go at twelve o’clock next Saturday.”
“But, Louise!” cried Esther, aghast, “you don’t truly mean to go!”
“I do!” cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.
“Oh, Louise!”
“Now, listen, dear, said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. ‘Don’t say a word till I tell you what my plan is. I’ve thought it all out, and you’ve got to help me.’”
Esther shuddered.
“You foolish child!” cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no obstacles to the carrying out of her plan. “You don’t think I mean to stay there, do you? I’m just going at twelve o’clock, and at four he comes back from the matinée, and at five o’clock I’m going to slip on my things and run downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coupé, and off we go. Now do you see?”
It took some time to bring Esther’s less venturesome spirit up to the point of assisting in this bold undertaking; but she began, after a while, to feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls, their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of impossibility. However, there is a financial manœuvre known as “kiting checks,” whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House; and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has called “kiting calls,” the girls found that they could make Saturday afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of Esther’s mother or Louise’s aunt—Louise had only an aunt to reckon with.
“And, oh, Esther!” cried the bolder of the conspirators, “I’ve thought of a trunk—of course I’ve got to have a trunk, or she would ask me where it was, and I couldn’t tell her a fib. Don’t you remember the French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in the store-room still, and I don’t believe anybody will ever come for it—it’s been there seven years now. Let’s go up and look at it.”
The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner, behind Louise’s baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk, corded up with clothes-line.