ten kinds of salad that I know how to make. Oh, I just can't wait to
tell you about our little love of a house! It's all furnished and
waiting for us. Papa and I were out to look all over it the day I
started, and everything was in place but the refrigerator, and Stuart
had already ordered one sent out.'

"Then Lloyd opened the closet door and called her attention to the great
pile of packages waiting to be opened. She flew at them and called us
all to help, and for a little while Mom Beck and Eliot were kept busy
picking up strings and wrapping-paper and cotton and excelsior. When we
were through, the bed and the chairs and mantel and two extra tables
that had been brought in were piled with the most beautiful things I
ever saw. I never dreamed there were such lovely things in the world as
some of the beaten silver and hand-painted china and Tiffany glass.
There was a jewelled fan, and all sorts of things in gold and
mother-of-pearl, and there was some point lace that she said was more
suitable for a queen than a young American girl. Her father has so many
wealthy friends, and they all sent presents.

"Opening the bundles was so much fun,--like a continual surprise-party,
Betty said, or a hundred Christmases rolled into one. Between times when
Eugenia wasn't exclaiming over how lovely everything was, she was
telling us how the house was furnished, and what a splendid fellow
Stuart is, and how wild she is for us to know him. I had never heard a
bride talk before, and she was so _happy_ that somehow it made you feel
that getting married was the most beautiful thing in the world.

"One of the first things she did when she opened her suit-case was to
take out a picture of Stuart. It was a miniature on ivory in a locket of
Venetian gold, because it was in Venice he had proposed to her. After
she had shown it to us, she put it in the centre of her dressing-table,
with the white flowers all around it, as if it had been some sort of
shrine. There was a look in her eyes that made me think of the picture
in Betty's room of a nun laying lilies on an altar.

"It is after luncheon now, and she has gone to her room to rest awhile.
So have the other girls. But I couldn't sleep. The days are slipping by
too fast for me to waste any time that way."

The house was quiet when Mary closed her journal. Joyce was still asleep
on the bed, and through the open door she could see Betty, tilted back
in a big chair, nodding over a magazine.