"Sue, don't you think it would be fun to try some of me in my Mandarin coat? Come up while I get into it. Oh, and go get Chow Yew to get that Chinese violin he plays, and I'll hold it! We'll take 'em in the Japanese garden!" Emily would be quite fired with enthusiasm, but before the girls were upstairs she might change in favor of her riding habit and silk hat, and Susan would telephone the stable that Miss Emily's riding horse was wanted in the side-garden. "You're a darling!" she would say to Susan, after an exhausting hour or two. "Now, next time I'll take you!"
But Susan's pictures never were taken. Emily's interest rarely touched twice in the same place.
"Em, it's twenty minutes past four! Aren't we going to tea with Isabel Wallace?" Susan would ask, coming in to find Emily comfortably stretched out with a book.
"Oh, Lord, so we were! Well, let's not!" Emily would yawn.
"But, Em, they expect us!"
"Well, go telephone, Sue, there's a dear! And tell them I've got a terrible headache. And you and I'll have tea up here. Tell Carrie I want to see her about it; I'm hungry; I want to order it specially."
Sometimes, when the girls came downstairs, dressed for some outing, it was Miss Ella who upset their plans. Approving of her little sister's appearance, she would lure Emily off for a round of formal calls.
"Be decent now, Baby! You'll never have a good time, if you don't go and do the correct thing now and then. Come on. I'm going to town on the two, and we can get a carriage right at the ferry--"
But Susan rarely managed to save the afternoon. Going noiselessly upstairs, she was almost always captured by the lonely old mistress of the house.
"Girls gone?" Mrs. Saunders would pipe, in her cracked little voice, from the doorway of her rooms. "Don't the house seem still? Come in, Susan, you and I'll console each other over a cup of tea."