“Number one. I wore my old suit because this morning it looked like rain; no one seems to bother much about rain in the city, but in the two weeks we’ve been at Oaklands, I’ve learned to tell by the colour of the morning sky, as we see it between two great trees on the hilltop, what the weather is likely to be. This morning it said rain, and though it’s held off all day, it’s beginning now.”
“Mercy me!” exclaimed Pussy, rushing to the window; “and my new lace coat is shrinkable, and interlined with chiffon, to say nothing of my maline hat. May I use the ’phone to call a cab, Agatha?”
“Secondly,” continued Marjory, “the Head of the Firm asked Billy, as a favour, if he would come down to-day,—though he still has two weeks to his credit,—for things were getting in a snarl. As I didn’t care to stay alone, and needed some downtown things, I came, too, and where do you think Billy and I lunched? In the private office of his Majesty, to be sure.”
“What a common thing for you to do,” interrupted Agatha, “trailing into the office after Billy and lunching with Mr. Coates before Mrs. Coates has had a chance to make her wedding call.”
Marjory flushed, but without replying to the criticism, continued, “Then after luncheon the Head of the Firm kindly offered to pilot me to do my last errand, which was in a very mussy sort of street that ran west of City Hall Park, and the result of the shopping is in those three boxes.
“Yes, Pussy, something breakable; I’ll give you three guesses. No? You give it up? Well, then, the boxes are full of eggs. Plymouth rocks, white leghorns, and buff cochins, each kind by itself. Not store eggs for cooking, with some ingredients missing, but hatching eggs that will turn into chickens; for it seems that they are quite different affairs, and Mr. Coates explained the whole matter to me so nicely.” (“How disgusting,” muttered Agatha.) “I find that he was brought up on a stock farm, and expects to have a model one of his own as soon as he and the Missus can settle upon a location.”
“Marjory Kent, will you please remember who you are, and refrain from applying such a vulgar title to Mrs. Erastus Coates, whose mother was Martin Cortright’s aunt, and her father a Philadelphia Biddle? Suppose it reached her ears, do you think it would improve your prospects?”
“Me? Oh, that’s not original; I was merely quoting the Head of the Firm, who called her ‘the Missus.’ ”
“I thought that no one used hens, and that all you had to do was to buy a box full of eggs, called an incubator, and the lamp that goes with it did the rest,” said Pussy, wisely, for she sometimes read the advertisements in her brother’s sporting paper.
“An incubator,” said Marjory, blind to the looks of boredom on the faces of her friends, “puts all the responsibility upon us, and unnecessary responsibility is what we are planning to avoid, for this summer at least. So as we have three very broad-chested, comfortable hens, who are simply ‘creaking’ with a desire to set, as Juno the cook puts it, we are going to supply them with good food and a nest of eggs apiece, and let them take the responsibility.