"No fair trying on up here," cried Prue, at last. "We must take everything we want downstairs, and fit ourselves out there; we'll never get down this way."
So everybody piled all that one pair of arms could carry into a great heap, and each one lifted his burden and carefully picked the way down the narrow, steep stairs, made particularly uncertain by the wavering lamp-light.
"Now, ladies to the right; gentlemen to the left," ordered Wythie. "You go into your room, papa, with the boys, and Mardy and Frances shall come into ours with us, and we'll do our best. Don't I wish you had wigs with queues!"
It took nearly three-quarters of an hour of excited hurrying and much laughter from both sides of the hall before the impromptu fancy-dress party was robed, and then at a signal nine queer figures appeared in two lines, and stopped short, each convulsed at the sight of the other.
Mr. Grey, in knee-breeches and cocked hat of an earlier period, was more imposing but not nearly as funny as Bruce in the costume of the '30s, nor as Basil, portentously scowling between the sharp collar-points like those which served as gateways to Daniel Webster's eloquence.
Bartlemy, in a long-tailed, short-waisted black coat which must have belonged to some clerical Grey, and with an incongruous white-silk hat, was so funny that Prue forgot her frail, rose-besprinkled muslin, and sat straight down on the floor to laugh at him. Wythie had found a muslin frock, short and tucked-in skirt and waist, and slippers such as Jane Austen's heroines tripped about in, and her pretty face was framed in a big leghorn hat, tied down into a poke at back and front. She looked as if she had stepped out of a Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait.
Rob had made herself into a lady of Revolutionary days, hair high, and gown of brocade low in neck, and draped with an immense embroidered fichu. Prue's muslin did not much antedate the civil war, but Frances had arrayed herself in a gown which Dolly Madison would have recognized as the latest fashion had she come to life to see it.
Mrs. Grey seemed to have taken what no one else wanted, but nothing else that she had on mattered much while she wore the great pink gauze turban which crowned her hair.
"It's a real pity no one can see us," declared Frances, when they were mustered in the dining-room, and had dropped, breathless with laughter, into the old chairs which should have welcomed gladly the figures of their youth returning to them.