Ruth was steering her car through Fifth Avenue, so Aunt Sallie merely smiled at her own expense, adding: “You’re a very disrespectful niece, Ruth.”
“I’d get on my knees to apologize, Auntie,” declared Ruth, “only there isn’t room, and we’d certainly be run into, if I did.”
Barbara was poring over the route book. Her duty as guide to the automobile party really began to-day, and she was studying every inch of the road map. What would she do if they were lost?
“You may look up from that book just once in every fifteen minutes, Guide Thurston,” Ruth said, pretending to be serious over Barbara’s worried look. “We promise not to eat you if you do get us a little out of our way. The roads are well posted. What shall we do if we meet some bandits?”
“Leave them to me,” boasted Barbara. “I suppose it’s my fate to play man of the party.”
“And what of the chauffeur?” Ruth protested. “I wonder what any of us could do if we got into danger.”
The day was apparently lovely. The girls were in the wildest spirits.
“I never believed until this minute,” announced Mollie, “that we were actually going on the trip to Newport. I felt every moment something would happen to stop us. I even dreamed, last night, that we met a great giant in the road, and he roared at us, ‘I never allow red motor cars with brass trimmings to pass along this road!’ Ruth wouldn’t pay the least attention to him, but kept straight ahead, until he picked up the car and started to pitch us over in a ditch. Then Ruth cried: ‘Hold on there! If you won’t let a red car pass, I’ll go back to town and have mine painted green. I must have my trip.’ Just as she turned around and started back, I woke up. Wasn’t it awful?”
“You are a goose,” said Grace, rather nervously. “It isn’t a sign of anything, is it? You ought not to tell your dreams after breakfast. You may make them come true.”
Barbara and Ruth both shouted with laughter, for Mollie answered just as seriously: “You’re wrong, Grace; it’s telling dreams before breakfast that makes them come true. I was particularly careful to wait.”