THE POLLY PAGE YACHT CLUB
CHAPTER I
THE LAUNCHING PARTY
“She was here just a minute ago. Wait till I find her, girls. We can’t go ahead without Polly.”
Ruth Brooks dropped her bouquet of white roses on the piano stool, and hurried out into the long corridor. It was still crowded with people, although Crullers had played the tenderest, saddest strains of “Träumerei,” and “Blumenlied,” to let them know it was time to go home. Ruth paused on the lower staircase a minute to see if Polly’s brown head showed anywhere below. Between the square reception hall, and the library, stood Miss Calvert, her figure tall and imposing in its black silk gown of state, even among so many. If there was one day in the entire year, when she was radiantly happy, and in her favorite element, it was Commencement day, so her girls said.
After the closing exercises, the members of the H. S. Club had managed to slip away unobserved during the reception. Polly had passed the secret word around that a last meeting would be held in the music room before school closed for vacation time. Yet in spite of this Polly herself, founder of the Hungry Six Club, and its president, and chief cook, was now missing.
Months before, when the fall term opened, the H. S. had been formed as a mutually protective association. Out of thirty-four pupils, twenty-eight at Calvert Hall were out-of-town girls. The other six were day scholars, and all lived at Queen’s Ferry, Virginia. Therefore the six had banded together, and stood by one another faithfully, against the united force of the twenty-eight “regulars.”
“What did Polly tell us to wait up here for?” asked Isabel Lee.
“Vacation,” came Sue’s matter-of-fact tone from the curtained window, where she was watching the long procession of carriages and automobiles in front of Calvert Hall. “Polly has an idea, and she wants us to sew buttons on it.”
“Oh, girls, who’s got the chafing-dish? Did any one remember to get it at all?” Edwina, which the girls cut short to Ted, looked dismayed at the others, and nobody responded. It was a serious moment. If the H. S. Club had possessed a coat-of-arms, there would have been a chafing-dish rampant on a field of fire as part of its symbolism. It had been Polly’s Christmas present to the club. She had smuggled it in, all unknown to Miss Calvert or the other girls, and had beguiled Annie May, the colored cook, to hide it. On special occasions it made its appearance at feasts, wonderful feasts, prepared with the help of Annie May, when the Hungry Six foregathered behind locked doors, with the chafing-dish in the place of honor.