“Here, baby, lie on the sofa, honey. Muddy is going to give you a little ride. Do you know, darling, that Katy knows how to put things in place just like a lady? She must have an artistic soul. Look how she has arranged the mantel-piece! Servants usually make things look so stiff. Actually there is nothing for me to do in the room, she has done it so beautifully.”
Billy here dug an elbow into Jo’s lame back that almost made her squeal, but she held on to her emotions and in turn gave her chum a fourth degree pinch.
“Now, Muddy is going to ride her baby—this sofa must go closer to the wall,” and Molly put Mildred on the sofa and gave it a vigorous push. The law of impenetrability, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, prevented the baby from having much of a ride. Molly gave a harder push. “I must be very feeble if I can’t budge this sofa.”
Then came a smothered groan from the huddled girls, and [one by one they emerged from their corner], clutching their bundles of dust rags and aprons and exposing to Molly’s amazed eyes three of the very blackest, dirtiest faces that ever Wellington had boasted in her senior class.
They sat on the floor and laughed and giggled, and Molly sat down beside them and would have felt like a college girl again herself if it had not been for little Mildred, who took all the laughter as an entertainment, got up for her express amusement, and gurgled accordingly.
“Now you must all stay to luncheon!” cried the hospitable Molly.
“Oh, indeed we mustn’t,” said Billie, who never could quite get used to Molly’s wholesale hospitality, having been brought up in the lap of luxury but with no privileges of inviting persons off hand to meals.
“But you must. I won’t do a thing for you but just put on more plates. I was going to have the very simplest meal and I’ll still have it.”
The girls stayed, after giving themselves a vigorous scrubbing, and Molly’s luncheon was ready when Professor Green arrived. The cold leg of lamb played a noble part at the impromptu party, flanked by a lettuce salad that Billie insisted upon dressing, reminding Molly more than ever of her darling Judy. A barrel of preserves had just arrived, some that Molly and Kizzie had put up during the summer. On opening it, a jar of blackberry jam, being on top, was chosen to grace the occasion. Molly made some of the tiny biscuit that her husband loved and that seemed such a joke to Katy. When she came in bearing a plate of hot ones, she spread her mouth in a grin so broad that Professor Green declared she could easily have disposed of six at one mouthful.
“I always call them Gulliver biscuit,” he said, helping himself to three at a time, “because in the old Gulliver’s Travels I used to read when I was a kid there was a picture of Gulliver being fed by the Lilliputians. He was represented by a great head, and the Lilliputians were climbing up his face by ladders and pouring down his throat barrels of little biscuit that were just about the size of these.”