“Happy to meet you. Titania, let me introduce the Sultan of Turkey and the Pirate of Penzance.”
Two tall lads stood just beyond Marcella. Betty shook hands with a richly dressed “Sultan” and a wildly equipped pirate, who looked very handsome and bent over Betty’s hand like some cavalier of old. Betty wondered if these boys were guests or just on a sort of receiving committee. If the pirate were one of the boys in school, he must be a senior or one of the older junior boys she was sure.
Two boys, who had been chatting with some others, turned back to be introduced to Betty and Kathryn by the pirate and Betty understood that they, too, properly belonged in the receiving line. All were masked except Marcella, who wanted to meet her guests in her proper person.
“The thing to do next,” said one of the girls, “is to go through the main rooms, see the decorations, visit the tent and have your fortune told, go and bob for apples or do some of the other stunts, whatever you can get in before the masked dancing begins. We’re going to have the old-fashioned square dances just as soon as everybody is here. But of course, you’re to talk to the other girls and boys and try to find out who they are—oh, you’ll see what to do. Marcella has somebody to tell you.”
Kathryn and Betty, however, did not feel like fortunes yet. They looked all around for Carolyn, who evidently had not arrived, and had an amusing conversation with a rollicking clown, who turned out to be, so they thought, Chet Dorrance; but he would not acknowledge it when Kathryn said that she “guessed it was Chet.” Betty hoped that Ted was there among some of the tall figures. He probably knew Marcella.
“It’s a good thing we’ve been having the funny old dances in ‘gym,’ isn’t it?” asked Kathryn. “Do you suppose the boys know ’em?”
“They can learn. I imagine we’ll all be told what to do. Besides, nobody has to dance that doesn’t want to.”
Carolyn came and found the girls, though she was claimed almost immediately by another clown, very spotty as to his ruffled and bulging suit and wearing at first a mask which covered his entire face, but that proved too hot. He had an ordinary mask in his pocket, he told Carolyn, who encouraged him to put it on. “Get into a corner and whisk off that hot mask,” she advised. “I’ll turn my back to you and hand you the little one.”
“You won’t give me away if you happen to see?”
“Of course not. I will keep your secret till we unmask!” she added, in lofty tones, then giggled.