“He couldn’t be coming or mother would have written me! I see he means for you to wait for him until he ‘arrives’ in his profession. Oh, Judy, Judy, I do hope you will! But come on now, we must take these things to the Greens. Miss Grace is very busy with her preparations, while Dodo is off for the day with young Andy and his Jap friend, revisiting their old college, Exmoor. We must get the mistletoe hung; and the ham is to be part of the party, I fancy. I am going to take them some of these pickles, too, and half of my fruit cake. It is so big that it will take us months to devour it, besides ruining our complexions.”
The girls, weighed down with their heavy contributions—ham, pickle, fruit cake and mistletoe—rang the bell at Professor Green’s house, fronting on the campus. The door was quickly opened by Miss Alice Fern. She eyed them haughtily and coldly, hardly responding to Molly’s greeting and barely acknowledging the introduction to Judy, whom she already knew, but refused to remember.
“My cousin, Miss Green, is very busy and regrets she cannot speak to you just now.”
“Oh, I am sorry not to see her! I have some mistletoe that my brother sent her from Kentucky, and Miss Kean and I were going to ask her to let us hang it for her.”
“You are very kind, but I am decorating the house for my cousins, and can do it very well without any assistance from outside.”
“Molly, we had better leave our packages and make a chastened departure,” said Judy, the irrepressible. “We have some interior decorations besides the mistletoe, Miss Fern, in the way of an old ham and a fruit cake, and some Rosemary pickles. Are you also chairman of the committee on that kind of interior decorations? If you are not, I should think it were best for us to interview the secretary of the interior, if we are not allowed to see the head of the department.”
At that moment who should come bounding up the steps but Edwin Green himself.
“Good morning to both of you! I am so glad to see you back in Wellington, Miss Kean. I have just come from the Quadrangle, where I went to call on you, but saw Miss Oldham, who told me you and Miss Molly were on your way to see my sister. Why don’t you come in? Grace is in the pantry, preparing for the ‘astonishment party,’ as I am told Miss Sen calls it. I will call her directly.”
“Grace has asked to be excused to callers, Edwin,” said the stately Miss Fern.
“Nonsense, Alice, she was expecting Miss Brown to decorate the parlors, and Miss Kean is not a stranger to any of us. Come in, come in,” and the indignant professor ushered them into the parlor and went to call his sister, confiding to her, as she hastened to greet the girls, that if Alice Fern did not stop trying to run their affairs he was going to do something desperate.