“He won’t have anything to wear,” objected Catherine.
“He can wear what he pleases to a Hallowe’en party,” Mr. Gould said. “Ask him, anyway.”
Now Catherine’s mother might let her do as she pleased, but her daddy, although he loved her dearly, could not be coaxed or teased. Catherine knew she would have to invite Roger, or else not have any party. Rather than give up the whole plan, she sent him one of the pretty invitations.
“Perhaps he will have sense enough not to come,” she said to Elizabeth Ann.
And at first it looked as though Roger wouldn’t go to the party.
“No, I’m not going,” he said when Elizabeth Ann spoke to him about it. “I don’t believe Catherine wants me to come to her party, and besides I haven’t a costume. Everyone is going to dress up and I’ll look queer. I suppose I could go as a tramp, but I’m tired of looking like a tramp every day.”
Elizabeth Ann thought this over. Doris said she was silly to worry about Roger, and she’d much better spend the time thinking up something for them to wear. Doris depended on Elizabeth Ann to “think” her a costume, as she said.
“I want Roger to have a good time,” explained Elizabeth Ann, “and he can’t have a good time unless he has a costume to wear. I’m going to ask Uncle Hiram what to do about it.”
By this time Elizabeth Ann and Uncle Hiram were excellent friends. He had taught her to tell time by the ship’s clock, and though she couldn’t, as she wrote Uncle Doctor, do it in a hurry, if she went about it slowly she could count the hours by bells very nicely. Uncle Hiram was always telling her that she would make a fine little sailor, and Elizabeth Ann thought that if she hadn’t first planned to be a doctor like Uncle Doctor and Lex, she might have liked to be a sailor.
“Uncle Hiram,” said Elizabeth Ann one afternoon when she came in, red-cheeked and breathless from running down the lane—she had raced Doris home from the bus and had won, as she usually did—“Uncle Hiram, you know that Catherine Gould is going to give a party Hallowe’en. That’s only a week off now. It’s going to be a party with prizes and ’freshments and everything. And all the class is invited.”