"I tell you, Zebedee is some provider when he gets started," said Dee. "I'm glad I didn't eat much dinner and I intend to eat no supper at all."
We were taking stock of our eatables before supper bell so we could see how many girls we could invite to the spread. It was etiquette at Gresham to give a girl fair warning when a spread was under way, so she could save space and not go and fill up in the dining-room. We wanted to avoid feeling like the old countryman who had his first experience with a table d'hôte dinner. Not knowing there was to be so much following the first course, he ate too much of it, and afterward loudly lamented: "Thar I sot chock full er soup."
Annie Pore was, of course, on the list and funny little Mary Flannigan and the two Seniors, Sally Coles and Josephine Barr. They had been especially nice to our crowd and we were anxious to show them some attention. That made seven in all.
"We've really got food for one more or even two," declared Dee, "but maybe we had better go easy because there is really not room for more."
117 was rather crowded with the three beds, two bureaus, three chairs and a table, and seven girls would just about fill it to overflowing. It did not look like the bare cell that had so appalled us on our day of entering Gresham. We now had a scrim curtain at the window; rugs on the floor; Tweedles had pretty Roman blankets on their beds with bright sofa cushions; while I had a beautiful log cabin quilt that Sally Winn had pieced for me in between her different death throes. The walls were literally covered with pennants from many schools and colleges with a few pictures that Dum had stuck in her trunk, purloined from their apartment in Richmond.
"I don't believe Zebedee will ever miss them, and they mean a lot to me," she had said when Dee had expressed astonishment on her producing them from her trunk. "I am so constituted that I've just got to have something beautiful to look at every now and then." The room was pleasant and cozy but the crowded walls rather got on my nerves. Bracken was so big and simple (some people would have called it bare) that I could not get used to such a conglomeration in a bedroom. I kept my taste to myself, however, as they were two to one, and no doubt my ideas of decoration were very old-fashioned and out of date.
Sally Coles and Jo Barr, whom we sought out before supper, were glad to accept and vowed they would eat not a bite before the feast so that they could come perfectly empty. Of course Annie Pore and Mary Flannigan were holding themselves in readiness for the arrival of the promised box from Mr. Tucker, and the news of its having come safely to hand was greeted with enthusiasm.
You get tired of any steady food except home food and sometimes you think you are tired of that, but as a rule you are pretty glad to get back to it. I fancy the table at Gresham was kept up about as well as any boarding school, but we knew that as sure as Tuesday was coming, roast veal was coming, too; and Wednesday would bring with it veal potpie; Thursday, beefsteak; and Friday, fish; Saturday, lamb stew with dumplings; Sunday, roast chicken; and Monday, not much of anything. This certainty bored us, and sometimes I used to think if I couldn't find something in the potpie besides veal, I'd scream. I had to do a lot of looking at the mountains on Wednesday, somehow.
A spread was a godsend, and an invitation to one was not as a rule given in vain. As Sally Coles and I fox-trotted together in the Gym after supper, she whispered in my ear: "It's certainly good of you kids to ask Jo and me. We're crazy about coming."
"We think it's pretty nice of you Seniors to come. You didn't even know we are to have caramel cake, either, did you?" I answered.