"Wait a minute and I'll go," said Sarah, jerking down her tan linen dress from its hook in the closet.
"Is Aunt Trudy's room all ready, Winnie?" asked Rosemary, as the three sisters stopped in the kitchen to notify that faithful individual of their departure. "Do we look nice?"
It was impossible to look at the three faces without an answering smile. Rosemary glowed, pink-cheeked, star-eyed, in a frock of dull blue linen made with wide white piqué collar and cuffs. Her hair waved and rippled and curled, despite its loose braiding, almost to her waist. Rosemary was simply going to the station to meet the 4:10 train, but nothing was ever casual to her; she met each hour expectantly on tip-toe and, as her mother had once observed, laughed and wept her way around the clock. Sarah smiled broadly—going to the station to meet Aunt Trudy had, for some inexplicable reason, resolved itself into a joke for her. Sarah was not excited and she represented solid common-sense from her straight Dutch-cut hair to her square-toed sandals, for no amount of argument from Rosemary could induce her to put on her best patent leather slippers. And Shirley—well Winnie picked up Shirley and hugged her fervently, which was the emotion Shirley generally inspired in all beholders. She was a young person, all yellow curls and fluffy white skirts and tiny perfect teeth and distracting dimples.
"Miss Wright's room is in perfect order," reported Winnie, setting Shirley down and straightening her pink sash. "I put on the embroidered bureau scarf and the best linen sheets and pillow cases, just as you said, Rosemary."
"And I put a bowl of lilacs on her table this morning," said Rosemary happily, "so I guess everything has been attended to. Do you want us to get anything up town? We're going to the station, Winnie."
"No, my dinner's all planned," answered Winnie with pride. "What train's Miss Wright coming on—the 4:10?"
"Yes, and Hugh said to have Bernard Coyle bring us up to the house with his jitney," said Rosemary. "I suppose Aunt Trudy will have some bags and parcels. You'll be round when we get back, won't you, Winnie? I don't know exactly what to say to her."
"Bless you, child, you'll do all right," Winnie encouraged her. "Doctor Hugh will be home to dinner and 'tisn't as if your aunt was a total stranger."
"But she really is a total stranger," commented Rosemary, as they began their walk to the station. "Of course she has been here a couple of days last summer and she spent New Year's with us; but Mother entertained her and we only saw her now and then, mostly at the table."
"Well, we have to make the best of it now, because Hugh says we can't upset Mother," said Sarah. "I know she will be an awful lot of trouble and she won't know the first thing about animals."