It seems like every time Miss Katherine goes away from the ’Sylum I’d be bad. Last time she hadn’t been gone two days till I’d invented more trouble. It was this way: In the summer we have much more time than in the winter, and the children kept coming to me asking me to make up something, and all of a sudden a play came in my mind. I just love acting. The play was to be the marriage of Dr. Rudd and Miss Bray.
You see, Miss Bray is dead in love with Dr. Rudd—really addled about him. And whenever he comes to see any of the children who are sick she is so solitious and sweet and smiley that we call her, to ourselves, Ipecac Mollie. Other days, plain Mollie Cottontail. It seemed to me if we could just think him into marrying her, it would be the best work we’d ever done, and I thought it was worth trying.
They say if you just think and think and think about a thing you can make somebody else think about it, too. And not liking Dr. Rudd, we didn’t mind thinking her on him, and so we began. Every day we’d meet for an hour and think together, and each one promised to think single, and in between times we got ready.
Becky Drake says love goes hard late in life, and sometimes touches the brain. Maybe that accounts for Miss Bray.
She is fifty-three years old, and all frazzled out and done up with adjuncts. But Dr. Rudd, being a man with not even usual sense, and awful conceited, don’t see what we see, and swallows easy. Men are funny—funny as some women.
I don’t think he’s ever thought of courting Miss Bray. But she’s thought of it, and for once we tried to help her, and the play was a corker; it certainly was. We chose Friday night because Miss Jones always takes tea with her aunt that night, and Miss Bray goes to choir practicing. I wish everybody could hear her sing! Gabriel ought to engage her to wake the dead—only they’d want to die again.
Dr. Rudd is in the choir, and she just lives on having Friday nights to look forward to.
The ceremony took place in the basement-room where we play in bad weather. It’s across from the dining-room, the kitchen being between, and it’s a right nice place to march in, being long and narrow.
I was the preacher, and Prudence Arch and Nita Polley, Emma Clark and Margaret Witherspoon were the bridesmaids.
Lizzie Wyatt was the bride, and Katie Freeman, who is the tallest girl in the house, though only fourteen, was the groom.