flaming hair.

[12]

Nobody came.

Mrs. Darrow had felt it cannier not to send written invitations. The little girls were merely to trip home and say—“Glen Darrow wants me to come to a party this afternoon!”—and the little girls had doubtless carried out their part of the program perfectly. It was the mothers who had missed their cues.

Lying long awake that night beside her placidly puffing spouse, Effie tortured herself with imagined dialogues——

“Why, honey-lamb, yo’ don’t know that child!— Well, suppose she does go to Miss Josephine’s—I don’t know her and I don’t know her mother and I don’t even know where she lives! No, yo’ just tell little what’s-her-name yo’ thank her just the same, but yo’ motha had otha plans fo’ yo’.”

Not even Nancy Carey! She came as far as the front gate under convoy of a stiffly starched young negress, and called up regretfully:

“Oh, Glen! I’m right sorry, but I can’t come! I have to go visiting with my Auntie Lou-May!”

At four o’clock one guest was among those present, Janice Jennings, a Northern child sojourning at the Bella Vista with a gay grandmother while her parents were being divorced.

“Grammer said I could come for a while but I[13] can’t eat any refreshments,” she announced with sincere regret. “My stummick is upset. She sent for your popper and he said I dassent eat any sweet stuff for a week. Lookit!” She produced, as evidence, an unpleasant tongue.

[13]

Pert, sharp with the brittle wisdom of a hotel child, she inspected games and food and favors, contrasting them frankly with more opulent affairs in her native Pittsburg, and when it seemed certain that no one else was coming she retrieved her hat and wrap.

“No fun playing games with just us two,” she said, candidly, “and as long as I can’t eat I’d rather sit on the hotel porch and listen to the ladies talking. They tell about who’s trying to get married, and who’s getting divorced, like my mother and father, and about babies coming, and if I keep awful still they don’t tell me to run away and play like a good girl.”

On departure, shaking hands primly and assuring them that she’d had a perfectly lovely time, shrill mirth laid hold on 

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