As majestically as my five feet four would permit, I moved to the front of the boat.
"Mary, Mrs. Gemmell wants you right away."
She took time to exchange a laughing farewell with the good-looking waiter, and explained to me en route:
"That's Bill Moreland. I knew him quite well in Lake City. I've met him at balls."
In the morning before we reached Chicago, she managed to get in a long confabulation with another waiter, whom I am sure she had never met in Lake City, nor anywhere else.
"See here, Mary! If this is the way you're going to behave, you go straight back to Lake City on that boat, and don't see one bit of the Fair."
Her manners were mended till we were actually in Jackson Park, but then:
"She's a philanthropist, Belle, a lover of mankind—Columbian Guard, Gospel Charioteer, Turk in the bazaar. The creed or the color doesn't matter so long as he calls himself a man."
I am afraid I was cross, for it did not take one day to realize what an undertaking it was going to be to keep track of my family, who had never before seemed too numerous. Daily at 10 a. m., in the Michigan Building, did I hand over to Will Axworthy the most troublesome of the lot, and daily did I wish he would keep her for better or worse.
On the Fourth of July cannonading began at daybreak, and for once I sympathized in my mother's objection to the license accorded to young Americans. They set off firecrackers, not by the bunch but by the bushel; kerosene and dynamite were their ambrosia and nectar. What with fighting for lunch in overcrowded restaurants, and then retaliating by stealing chairs out of the same, hunting through the various booths in the Midway to collect my three younger sons when it was time to send them home, and rescuing my two little girls from an over-supply of ice cream sodas and chocolate drops, I did not specially enjoy the glorious Fourth.