It was worth being away from home to be one of the four girls who hung upon the Amiable Parent the next day as he wandered happily through the campus, distributing Allegretti and admiration as he went. He beamed upon them all, annexing the pretty ones regardless of expense, as his irreverent daughter put it. He chartered a tally-ho, and they tooted off to Chesterfield and broke the horn beyond repair, convulsing him with laughter all the way. Caroline cut her laboratory for it and enjoyed it "with a serene and sickly suavity known only to the truly virtuous," to use her friends' quotation; Dodo was a continuous performance all the way; and at Chesterfield they ate till there was little left in the village, as it had not been sufficiently forewarned of their invasion.
They got back in time to dress, and here Marjory's ideas sustained a distinct shock. She had always perfectly understood from the fiction devoted to such descriptions that it was the custom of young ladies at boarding-schools and colleges, when they wished to be peculiarly uproarious and sinful, to gather in carefully darkened apartments, robed in blanket-wrappers and nightgowns, with braided or dishevelled hair, in order to eat olives and pickles with hat-pins from the bottles, toasting marshmallows at intervals, and discussing the suitability of cribs and the essential qualities of really earnest friendships. But the consumption of the "box énorme" was differently organized. If she hadn't brought any evening dress it didn't matter, Nan assured her, but they considered the event more than worthy of it, though it wasn't an occasion for a Prom costume by any means.
All the way down the corridor she smelled it, that night at seven. It was necessarily far from private—envious upper-class girls not invited sniffed it from afar, and the three little freshmen who waited on them glowed with pride and anticipation. It was in Ursula's room, for Nan's was too small and the guests used it for a cloak-room. Mrs. Austin greeted her cordially at the door, and Marjory, who had always supposed that those in authority were constitutionally opposed to spreads, could not realize that her wreathèd smiles were genuine. She did not know that the Amiable Parent had dutifully called upon Mrs. Austin in all good form, openly discussed the spread, and cannily presented the lady with a fascinating box of Canton ginger-buds—ginger being the Amiable Parent's professional interest.
When they were assembled, a baker's dozen of them, the Amiable Parent grinning, as his dutiful daughter expressed it, like a Cheshire cat over his capacious shirt-front, Marjory made their acquaintance over again from the evening-dress standpoint. Against the dark furniture and bookbindings their shoulders shone soft and white; their hair was piled high; they looked two or three years older. Ursula in pink taffeta, with coral in her glossy dark coils, was a veritable marquise; Nan in white with lavender ribbons, and a pale amethyst against her throat, was transformed from a jolly, active girl to a handsome young woman with charmingly correct shoulders; Caroline was almost pretty; Lucilla's small prim head was set on the most beautiful tapering little neck in the world. Only Dodo in an organdie many times laundered was the same as ever, bony, awkward, and the greatest fun possible; while Carol's strange half-sullen face looked more impassive than ever under her heavy turquoise fillet.
The freshmen, shy but delighted, passed them "food after food," as Dodo called it: cold roast chicken, lobster salad on crisp, curly lettuce, delicious thin, little bread-and-butter sandwiches with the crusts off, devilled eggs, stuffed olives, almonds and ginger. There was a great sheet of fudge-cake, which is a two-storied arrangement of solid chocolate cake with a thick fudge filling and a half-inch icing, a compound possible of safe consumption to girls and ostriches only. There were dozens and dozens of a fascinating kind of thin wafer filled with nuts, and there were plates of chocolate peppermints. Also there were many bottles of imported ginger ale, which the freshmen presented in graceful, curved glasses after the Amiable Parent had with much chuckling pulled the corks, the freshmen pitching these last cheerfully down the corridor at their friends who came to scoff but went away to pray. That immediate amalgamation with the class of her hostesses which always occurs to guests made Marjory regard the pretty waitresses with upper-class patronage, till it occurred to her that they might be older than she, and that after all....
One in especial, whom the Amiable Parent insisted on feeding from his own plate, was very pretty and apparently very popular. But why the brown-eyed, red-cheeked adorer of Ursula should be Theo Root, while Miss Bent was always Dodo; why Alida Fosdick was Dick, but Serena Burdick was Serena; why Elizabeth Twitchell was Twitchie, but Elizabeth Mitchell was Betty; why Ursula was always Ursula, and Nan was often Jack and sometimes Pip (it was because Captain Gadsby was one of her famous parts) Marjory could not tell.
When they were through and not another of all those two pounds of almonds could be eaten, and the freshmen had carried off the remains to dispose of them in the most obvious and economical manner, they proceeded to "do stunts," to the boundless joy of the Amiable Parent. Dick Fosdick, a plain, heavy-eyed senior, arose, draped in a black cashmere shawl, and delivered a lecture on the suffrage in a manner to cause one to pinch oneself to make sure it was not a dream and she was not forty-five and horrible. The Amiable Parent choked to suffocation, vowed she was the cleverest actress this side the water, and called for the next. Dodo, with lifted skirts and utterly unmoved features, jumping up heavily and landing on both feet with turned-in toes—she followed the good old custom of tan walking-boots with evening dress—droned in a monotonous nasal chant, to which her thudding feet kept time, an unholy song of no tune whatever:
Oh, it's dance like a fairy and sing like a bird,
And sing like a bird,
And sing like a bird,