“Candle shades?--won't it be daylight at six o'clock?”
“Well, then, we'll pull down the window shades,” said Tess, undisturbed. “Candle-light 'll add--”
Aunt Nettie, who couldn't keep still any longer, cut in:
“Will you tell me where you're going to get an orchestra?”
“Oh,” said Tess, with an air of patience, “we're going to fix the date on a band-practice night. I guess they'd be willing to practice on your porch if we gave them some ice-cream and cake.”
“Music always adds so much e'clat to an affair,” pursued Tess, unruffled.
“The band practicing 'll add a-clatter, all right,” commented Aunt Nettie, adding a syllable to Tess's triumphant word.
Missy, visioning the seductive scene of Tess's description, did not notice her aunt's sarcasm.
“If only we had a butler!” she murmured dreamily.
Aunt Nettie made as if to speak again, but caught an almost imperceptible signal from her sister.
“Surely, Mary,” she began, “you don't mean to say you're--”
“Remember, Nettie, that when there's poison in the system, it is best to let it out as quickly as possible.”
But Missy was too thrilled by the leniency of her mother's attitude to linger on any side-question--anyway, grown-ups were always making incomprehensible remarks. She came back swiftly to the important issue.
“And may we really have the party here, Mother?”
Mother smiled at her, a rather funny kind of smile.
“I guess so--the rest of us may as well have the benefit.”
Tess and Missy wrote the invitations themselves and decided to deliver them in person, and Missy had no more prevision of all that decision meant than Juliet had when her mother concluded she would give the ball that Romeo butted in on.
Tess said they must do it with empressement, meaning she would furnish an equipage for them to make their rounds in. Her father was a doctor, and had turned the old Smith place into a sanitarium; and, to use the Cherryvale word, he had several “rigs.” However, when the eventful day for delivery arrived, Tess discovered that her father had disappeared with the buggy while her mother had “ordered out” the surrey to take some ladies to a meeting of the Missionary Society.
That left only an anomalous vehicle, built somewhat on the lines of a victoria, in which Tim, “the coachman” (in Cherryvale argot known as “the hired man”), was wont to take convalescent patients for an airing. Tess realized the possible lack of dignity attendant upon having to sit in the driver's elevated seat; but she had no choice, and consoled herself by terming it “the box.”