When she had completed her lowly job she sat down at her desk and wrote two notes.
One was to Judith Blount, in which she accepted her invitation to wait at table in the most polite and correct terms, and signed her name "Mary Carmichael Washington Brown."
The second letter, which was to Frances Andrews, was also a note of acceptance.
Then Molly removed her collar, rolled up her sleeves, kicked off her pumps--a signal that she was going to begin work--and sat down to cram mathematics,--the very hardest thing in life to her and the subject which was to be a stumbling block in her progress always.
Molly turned up at the Beta Phi House about five o'clock the next evening. She wore a blue linen so that if any grease sputtered it would fall harmlessly on wash goods, and in other ways attired herself as much like a maid as possible with white collar and cuffs and a very plain tight arrangement of the hair.
"If I'm to be a servant, I might as well look like one," she thought, as she marched upstairs and rapped on Judith's door.
"Come in," called the voice of Jennie Wren. "Judith's gone walking with her guests," she explained; "but she left her orders with me, and I'll transmit them to you," she added rather grandly. "You are to do the cooking. Here are all the things in the ice box, and there's the gas stove on the trunk. Miss Brinton and I will set the table."
Molly gathered that Caroline Brinton, the unbending young woman from Philadelphia, had been chosen as her assistant.
The tiny ice box was stuffed full of provisions. There was the inevitable beefsteak, as Sallie had predicted; also canned soup; a head of celery, olives, grape fruits, olive oil, mushrooms, cheese--really, a bewildering display of food stuffs.
"Did Miss Blount decide on the courses?" Molly asked Jennie Wren.
"No; she got the raw material and left the rest entirely with you. 'Tell her to get up a good dinner for six people,' she said. 'I don't care how she does it, only she must have it promptly at six-fifteen.'"
There were only two holes to the gas stove and likewise only two saucepans to fit over them, so that it behooved Molly to look alive if she were to prepare dinner for six in an hour and a quarter.
A calm, experienced cook with the patience of a saint might have felt some slight irritability if she had been placed in Molly's shoes that evening. Nothing could be found. There was no can opener, no ice pick, the coffeepot had a limited capacity of four cups, and there was no broiler for the steak. It had to be cooked in a pan. It must be confessed also that it was the first time in her life Molly had ever cooked an entire meal. She had only made what her grandmother would have called "covered dishes," or surprise dishes, and she now found preparing a dinner of four courses for six people rather a bewildering task.