green, and the
rugs like that dark velvety moss that grows in the deepest woods. When
we had finished filling the vases and jardinieres, the room itself all
snowy white and green made you think of a bush of bridal wreath.

"We were barely through with that when it was time for Lloyd and Aunt
Elizabeth to go to the station to meet Eugenia. There wasn't room for
the rest of us in the carriage, so Betty and Joyce and I hung out of the
windows and watched for them, and Betty and Joyce talked about the other
time Eugenia came, when they walked up and down under the locusts
waiting for her and wondering what she would be like. When she did come,
they were half-afraid of her, she was so stylish and young-ladified, and
ordered her maid about in such a superior way.

"Betty said it was curious how snippy girls of that age can be
sometimes, and then turn out to be such fine women afterward, when they
outgrow their snippiness and snobbishness. Then she told us a lot we had
never heard about the school Eugenia went to in Germany to take a
training in housekeeping, and so many interesting things about her that
I was all in a quiver of curiosity to see her.

"When we heard the carriage coming, Betty and Joyce tore down-stairs to
meet her, but I just hung farther out of the window. And, oh, but she
was pretty and stylish and tall--and just as Betty had said,
_patrician_-looking, with her dusky hair and big dark eyes. She is the
Spanish type of beauty. She swept into the house so grandly, with her
maid following with her satchels (the same old Eliot who was here
before), that I thought for a moment maybe she was as stuck-up as ever.
But when she saw her old room, she acted just like a happy little girl,
ready to cry and laugh in the same breath because everything had been
made so beautiful for her coming. While she was still in the midst of
admiring everything, she sat right down on the bed and tore off her
gloves, so that she could open the queer-looking parcel she carried. I
had thought maybe it was something too valuable to put in the satchels,
but it was only a new kind of egg-beater she had seen in a show-window
on her way from one depot to another. You would have thought from the
way she carried on that she had found a wonderful treasure. And in the
midst of showing us that she exclaimed:

"'Oh, girls, what do you think? I met the dearest old lady on the
sleeper, and she gave me a receipt for a new kind of salad. That makes