“Oh, dear me,” sighed Jane. “Nothing worse than fussy people! Maybe I wouldn’t; maybe Win would have been home, or you here, and I’d still have said he. Coming with me to get ready to see the Moultons, Marygold? They’ll be here so late we shall have to get dressed for supper before they come.”
“Yes. Florimel, if Mrs. Moulton saw you wearing that torn skirt I don’t know what might happen to her,” said Mary, joining Jane at the foot of the stairs.
“She’ll see me wearing a whole skirt. Wait till I put Chum out,” said Florimel.
Mary and Jane did not take Florimel’s “wait” literally. They knew that putting Chum out could hardly be called putting—it involved long coaxing and wiles, and feigned enthusiasm and excitement over a cat in the garden, which had no existence there or elsewhere. So the two older girls went on up to their rooms, leaving Florimel to the persuasion of Chum.
“What do you say it is?” asked Jane a little later, standing in Mary’s chamber door, her radiant hair falling over her white skirt and flying around her face in a glory to which Mary never became thoroughly accustomed. Jane was drying her face as she spoke; she never could be kept in the proper spot long enough to finish any part of her toilet. Mary was bent over, combing up the heavy masses of her own soft brown hair. She looked up from under it at Jane’s reflection in the mirror.
“What do I suppose what is?” Mary asked.
“What Mr. Moulton has to tell us, of course,” said Jane. “I’ve been thinking. He’s our guardian, you know, so I think it’s one of two things: Either we are a great deal poorer than we are supposed to be, or a great deal richer. His voice certainly sounded excited; the more I think of it the surer I am that Mr. Moulton’s voice was queer. When guardians in books have anything to tell their wards it is something about money, so I suppose we’re beggared, or else——”
“We’re not!” Mary ended Jane’s sentence for her with a laugh. “Just like the effect of the White Knight’s poem, which either brought tears to your eyes or it didn’t! Janie, you’re the greatest goose—for a duck! You’re precisely like the heathen imagining vain things! Mr. Moulton probably wants to talk about naming a plant for one of us; he’s been talking about that ever since he began experimenting with those hybrids of his, which are going to produce a new flower.”
“You’ll see!” said Jane, throwing out her hair and running her fingers through it till it crackled and followed them, standing out around her.
“Jane,” protested Mary, “go away! You make me think of the burning bush and ‘the pillar of fire by night,’ till I feel quite wicked and irreverent.”