Lucile’s eager voice came back quickly in answer to Jo Ann with an invitation for all five to spend the night at her home. “You’ve arrived at the right moment,” she went on. “Edna is visiting me and I’m having a little dinner party for her tonight.”
Jo Ann refused the first part of the invitation, explaining that they had already secured their rooms at the hotel. “We’ll be delighted to come to your dinner party, though,” she added.
Miss Prudence broke in quickly with an emphatic, “Tell her it’ll be impossible for me and Carlitos to come. I’m too tired to go another step anywhere. If they’ll come after you girls and bring you back, it’ll be all right for you to go without me.”
Jo Ann relayed this message to Lucile, ending, “We’ll be ready when you get here.”
CHAPTER IV
PRESSING DIFFICULTIES
After Jo Ann had finished talking to Lucile, Florence and Peggy asked together, “Is it a real party she’s having? Will we have to dress up?”
“Yes, we’ll have to wear dinner dresses, of course. We’ll have to speed, too, if we’re to be ready when she gets here.”
“Oh, I’m afraid my blue crêpe’ll be a mass of wrinkles,” Peggy exclaimed as she hurried over and began unpacking her clothes.
“Get my dress—the pink taffeta—out, too,” Jo Ann called out on her way to the bathroom. “It’s in your suitcase. I’ll have my bath in two jiffies and be in my dress in another one.”
When she reappeared in the room a few minutes later, garbed in a negligee whose rose color matched her fresh glowing cheeks, she found that Miss Prudence and Carlitos had gone to the dining room and that Florence and Peggy were standing lamenting over the wrinkled state of their dinner dresses.