Millicent accepted this compliment with a complacent smile.
“Papa and mamma think I am,” she remarked, “but I have artistic knowledge enough to know that this is only a beginning. When I am able to make a bas-relief of Greek dancing figures on a silver box, I shall call myself really great. At present I am only near-great.”
“What are you going to do with these things?” asked Margaret.
“Oh, nothing. They just accumulate and I pack them away. I don’t have to sell any of them, of course.”
“Don’t you want to exhibit some of them at the George Washington Bazaar?” asked Margaret. “The Bazaar will sell them for you at ten per cent commission. The money goes to the student fund. You can have a booth if you like and dress up as Benvenuto Cellini or some famous worker in silver. I am chairman and can make any appointments I choose.”
Molly could hardly keep from smiling over the expression on Millicent’s face. The worker in silver and the dealer in antiques were struggling for supremacy in the soul of their descendant.
“Oh,” she cried in great excitement, “I will fix it up like a Florentine shop, full of beautiful old stuffs and curios. It will be the most beautiful booth in the Bazaar. And I will choose Miss Brown to assist me. You shall be dressed as a Florentine lady of the Renaissance. I have the very costume.”
Now Margaret, as Chairman of the Bazaar, preferred all appointments to be made officially, but seeing that Millicent was very much in earnest and that such a booth would greatly add to the picturesqueness of the affair, she made no objections.
“There is one thing I would advise you to do, Miss Porter,” she said when the plan was settled, “and that is to keep your silver things under lock and key because there is a thief about in Wellington. You might as well know it, because, sooner or later, you’ll lose something. We all of us have. My monogram ring went this morning. I left it on the marble slab in the wash room and when I came back for it not three minutes later it was gone.”
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Molly, “I do hate things like that to happen. Why will people do such things?”