"I teach singing here. Have been here for years. And to think of your girls being old enough to go to boarding school! It seems only yesterday that you and dear little Virginia were leading the germans at the University. I haven't seen you since you married. I meant to write you when Virginia died, but somehow I just couldn't."
"That was all right, Jinny. I knew how you felt without hearing from you. She only lived a year, you know. Tweedles were just a few weeks old when she died." And the dear man who a moment before had been so cheerily singing the Lobster Quadrille, now wiped his eyes and seemed given over to melancholy.
"I want you to know our girls. This is Virginia," indicating Dum, "and this, Caroline," meaning Dee. I was rather amused at the fact that earlier in the day he could not remember their official names, as he called them. "I named this one Virginia, thinking she was going to have her mother's eyes, but the little monkey changed them on me and in a twinkling turned herself into a hazel-eyed monster," and poor Zebedee forgot to cry any more and began to laugh. "This is the much dreaded roommate, Miss Page Allison, of Milton, Virginia. The wild orgy which you so tactfully joined was in honor of the discovery that this young lady was the roommate."
"Well, girls, I am glad to see all of you and hope we can be great friends. My name is Jane Cox. I can't remember any one having the hardihood to call me Jinny for some sixteen or seventeen years. I haven't danced for at least ten years. I don't know what the management or the girls would think or say if they knew I had cut up this way. I don't know what made me do it. I came to the door to stop the racket and when I saw Jeff Tucker whirling around with three girls singing, 'Will you, won't you, won't you, will you, will you join the dance?' my discretion flew to the four winds. I just did have sense enough left to shut the door. I forgot I was an old maid, teaching singing in a boarding school."
"It was simply splendid of you to come in and help us out," exclaimed Dee. Dee was usually the one who knew what to say and when to say it. Some persons call it tact, but I have always thought it was just a kind heart that made her know what people wanted her to say. Cousin Sue Lee was the same kind of natural-born social wonder. "I think your voice is beautiful, and how on earth did you happen to know our tune?"
"Why, child, your father and I made up that tune on a picnic once years before you were born. Do you remember, Jeff, when we went to Monticello, and how it rained? We composed the tune and improvised a Lobster Quadrille to cheer up the bedraggled crowd. How Virginia did laugh! I haven't thought of that tune for ages. Perhaps it is because I have not been with the kind of people who would enjoy 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
"Zebedee has put us to sleep with it ever since we were born," said Dum. "I mean the tune."
"And I have been reading Alice in Wonderland ever since I was born," I ventured.
"Well, I'm certainly glad to meet some kindred spirits at Gresham," said Miss Cox, "and now, girls, I'm going to ask a great favor of the three of you. I want you to keep to yourselves that I broke loose as I did. I have hard enough work as it is keeping order during study hour when that task falls to me, and if the girls ever found out that I was capable of such high-jinks, I'd lose all control of them." We promised, but I, for one, thought that the more human you find your pastors and masters to be, the more apt you are to want to make things easy for them. Miss Jane Cox was much older than I, but she had yet to learn that wisdom.
"We'll all promise," we declared in unison.