"Why don't you let me then?" Rodrigo grinned in reply.
"By Jove, I will," Bill resolved. "Say—I tell you. I've got a couple of extra tickets for the Princeton-Yale commencement baseball game at Princeton Saturday. Why don't you get somebody and come along with us? You'll like it. You've never seen anything like it—all the Princeton grads parading in costume, plenty of color and jazz and all that sort of thing. Have you got a girl or somebody to take? Not Binner, of course."
So it happened that Rodrigo drove Mary Drake over to the Terhune home in East Orange the next Saturday bright and early in the morning. Bill's wife proved to be a very pretty, vivacious girl of about Mary's own age. There was a three-year-old daughter who took to Rodrigo and Mary at once and embarrassed them by asking innocently if they were married.
They started off merrily, the girls in the back seat and the men in front, and joined the long procession of blue and orange-and-black bannered cars rolling along the road out of Newark and across the New Jersey flats.
Princeton was jammed with gay throngs. All the vacant lots were dotted with reunion tents, and old and young men in Scottish Highlander costumes, sailor suits, clown suits, and all manner of outlandish rigs mingled with the plain citizens and pretty girls on Nassau Street. Having parked the car, they joined the mobs. Bill had to stop every few feet, it seemed to Rodrigo, to greet friends of his college days. Rodrigo judged that his companion must have been the most popular man who ever went to Princeton.
Bill took them to lunch at his club down Prospect Street with its close-cropped lawns and cool shade-trees. Afterward he left them momentarily to parade with his class into the athletic field, Rodrigo escorting the two girls to their seats in the crowded grandstand. It was a gorgeous panorama of color, youth and vivacity. Never had Mary Drake seemed so happy and carefree. Never had she smiled at him so gayly and intimately, Rodrigo told himself.
To make the afternoon's pleasure complete, Princeton won the ball game and the Terhune party stood up on the wooden boards and watched the mad, whirling phantasmagoria of victory-crazed undergraduates and graduates alike gyrating in dervish fashion in the age-old snake dance down there on the scene of the triumph.
They motored back at a snail's pace, forced to throttle their speed by the long lines of cars ahead of them. They stopped in Newark and had dinner at a clean little restaurant on South Broad Street. Later, Rodrigo secured his own car from Bill's garage and, with sincere expressions of thanks and farewell, left the happy Terhune family waving at them from the trim suburban lawn.
"Oh, I have loved every minute of it!" Mary exclaimed when they were alone. "Thank you a thousand times for inviting me along."
"Its been wonderful to have you," he replied. "You've added a lot to my pleasure. We'll have lots of nice little parties this summer, Mary—at the beach and other places."