College students -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
Not a little curiosity was felt by the Queen's girls to see Mr. and Mrs.
Kean, whom Judy had described as paragons of beauty and wit, and they
assembled at Wellington station in a body to meet the distinguished
pair. Judy herself was in a quiver of happy excitement and when finally
the train pulled into the station, she rushed from one platform to
another in her eagerness. Of course they had taken the chair car down,
but she was too bewildered to remember that there was but one such coach
on the Wellington train, and it was usually the rear car.
"I don't find them. Oh, mamma! Oh, papa! You couldn't have missed the
train!" she cried, addressing the spirits of the air.
Just then a very tall, handsome man with eyes exactly like Judy's
pinioned her arms from behind.
"Well, little sister, don't you know your own father?"
He was just as Judy had described him; and her word-picture also fitted
Mrs. Kean, a dainty, pretty, little woman, with a doll-like face and
flaxen hair, who would never have given the impression that she was in
the habit of roughing it in engineering camps, sleeping out of doors,
riding across sun-baked plains on Texas bronchos, and accompanying her
husband wherever he went on his bridge and railroad-building trips.
"Judy hasn't had much home life," she said later to Molly. "We had to
take our choice, little sister and I, between a home without papa or
papa without a home, and we decided that he was ten thousand times more
delightful than the most wonderful palace ever built."
Her extravagant speeches reminded Molly of Judy; but the mother was much
gentler and quieter than her excitable daughter, and perhaps not so
clever.
They dined at Queen's that night and made a tour of the entire house,
except Judith Blount's room, all apartments having been previously
spruced up for inspection. Otoyo had shown her respect for the occasion
by hanging a Japanese lantern from the chandelier and loading a little
table with "meat-sweets," which she offered to the guests when they
paused in her room during their triumphal progress through the house.
Later Molly and Nance entertained at a fudge and stunt party and Mr. and
Mrs. Kean were initiated into the secrets of life at Queen's.
They entered into the fun like two children, and one of the stunts, a
dialogue between the Williams sisters, amused Mr. Kean so much that he
laughed loud and long, until his wife shook him by the shoulder and
exclaimed:
"Hush, Bobbie. Remember, you're not on the plains, but in a girls'
boarding school."
"Yes, Robert," said Judy, who frequently spoke to her parents by their
first names, "remember that you are in a place where law and order must
be maintained."
"You shouldn't give such laugh-provoking stunts, then," answered Mr.
Kean, "but I'll try and remember to put on the soft pedal hereafter."
Then Molly, accompanying herself on Judy's guitar, sang:
"Big camp meetin' down the swamp,
Oh, my! Hallelujah!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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