“Quite a soup tureen, too,” replied Esther, “and Mrs. Ricketts is bigger than Mrs. Brownell.”
It was fun, after all, to be on the girls’ committee, for not only were the exhibits the queerest old things imaginable, but the women who brought the articles were queer, and if not always old, at least not very young.
And they took so much pride in the heirlooms that the Home Exhibit afforded them a rare treat, indeed. Mrs. Brownell’s table and Mrs. Rickett’s soup tureen were merely samples of the goods contributed, but it was the needlework and the quilts that formed the bulk and real problem of the exhibit.
“Where’ll I hang this?” Louise would call out, holding up as much as she could manage of a red and white log-cabin quilt.
Then the owner would start in giving orders. She would want it hung “just so” over the balustrade.
“But the silk quilts and handwoven portieres are to hang over the balustrade,” Miss Trainor would insist. “Mrs. Winters arranged all that.” Mrs. Winters was general chairman and certainly should have been on hand on this afternoon; but she wasn’t.
“These tidies,” pleaded quiet little Lida, quite helplessly, “where can we show the tidies?”
“We’ve simply got to have a special place for the small handwork,” Cara said sensibly. “We’ll drown in tidies and center-pieces if we don’t. Dad would send a carpenter over to fix up a nice rack, with hooks that couldn’t tear. Where’s Babs?”
“Yes, where is Babs?” joined in a number of the girls, for Barbara being chairman of the girls’ committee, and the girls being in charge of all the ladder climbing and the dusting of the old nooks and cobwebby corners—to say nothing of taking the goods from the loving hands of the lenders—they certainly expected Barbara to be around all the time and in every place at once.
But just now she could not be found. The Stillwell House on the ocean front, chosen as the most suitable and convenient place to hold the summer exhibit, contained plenty of rooms and was built like a farm-house, with the entire first-floor rooms connecting by wide doorways and passages. The house had not been used as a summer home for a number of years, and those of the pretty little colony who understood values, considered the quaint place as a possible public library and Community Center for Sea Cosset.