"I've known him as long as I've known you—almost as long as I've known anybody."
"Why, of course, Priscilla. I remember when we used to see him at parties in a Fauntleroy suit. But I've lost track of him for an age and I thought you had, too, that's all." There was an underlying astonishment in Peggy's apology. She could not understand Priscilla's seeming readiness to take offense. And when Priscilla began to talk of something quite different, Peggy realized with fresh amazement that the peculiarities of Horace Hitchcock were, for the present, a tabooed topic between them.
CHAPTER V
THE RUMMAGE SALE
Summer vacation! Although the Field Day exercises, and the few Commencement festivities to which undergraduates are invited, were only four days past, classes and lessons seemed to the Quartet never to have existed; or if so, only in a dream. And it would be the same way when college began again in the fall. Summer, of a few days before, would be a dim memory of the past.
Though they had not heard from their examinations, they all felt reasonably confident of having passed successfully. At any rate, they had put the thought of them resolutely out of mind, following Peggy's, "one thing at a time, and when it's done, it doesn't do any good worrying about it." Those four days had been devoted to concentrated doing nothing.
"'Dulce far Niente' is such a pretty phrase it makes a virtue of loafing," said Priscilla.
And to this, for the time being, the other three agreed.