“Would you like a little cold cream, Miss Sallie, to wipe off your face?” Mollie spoke timidly, remembering how Barbara had laughed at her.
“Certainly I should, my child, and very intelligent of you to have brought it along.”
“Well,” said Ruth, “if you must ‘fix up,’ and I am to take a party of belles and beauties into Newport, instead of true lovers of sport, there are lots of new veils under my seat. Bab, take them out and pass them around. Only the chauffeur shall be dusty and dilapidated enough to look the part.”
Behold their dream had come true! The automobile girls were at last in Newport, watching the summer parade!
Ruth, at the expected hour, turned her car, with a great flourish, into Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s most fashionable thoroughfare. For a few minutes the girls beheld a long procession of carriages and automobiles; a little later, they swung round a corner and stopped in front of a beautiful old Colonial house, with a wide veranda running around three sides of it, and a hospitably open front door.
Miss Sallie descended first, to be greeted by Ralph’s mother, who was expecting them.
“I don’t like her. She’s not a bit like Ralph,” thought Barbara. Then she gave herself an inward shake. “There, Barbara, you know what mother would say to you about your sudden prejudices!”
Mrs. Ewing, who had been a great beauty in her day, looked as though life had disagreed with her.
Barbara had wondered how a private home could accommodate so many people, never having seen a handsome old New England house, but their three rooms occupied only half of one side of the long hall on the second floor. “And they think they are poor!” smiled Bab, to herself, as she looked admiringly at the handsome furniture. “I wonder what they would think of our little five-room cottage.”
“I want some clean clothes before anything else,” sighed dainty Mollie, standing before a mirror, gazing with disdain at her own appearance. “I believe I have one clean shirtwaist left, but I must still wear this dusty old skirt.”