"I saw Mr. Ferry this morning, and he said he did not want to wait for us to come over with our hats and gloves on and call, he wanted to bring the girls and his mother over this afternoon, so as to lose no time in having them find out what was on the farther side of the hedge. I asked him why he hadn't brought them with him then--it was at eight o'clock this morning. But he said he wanted to bring them himself, and he was then on his way to his car--otherwise he thought he should not have hesitated at all on account of the hour. He said they were crazy to come." "Sally! He didn't say they were _crazy_ to come." "He didn't use that particular word, perhaps--men never do, of course. But he said 'eager,' or 'anxious,' or something like that--it means the same thing. Evidently they've been told all about us. What would you give, Jo Burnside, to know how we've been described?" "We probably haven't been described. Men never describe people. They just say, 'She's all right, you'll like her,' or something equally vague." "It would give me a chance to wear my lilac muslin," mused Sally quite irrelevantly, but Josephine caught her meaning. "Afternoon tea on the lawn? Then do let's have it. Anything to see you in that lilac muslin." "Then we'll trail over the lawn to meet them--only the lilac muslin doesn't trail--and we'll hold out our hands at a medium sort of angle, so that we'll be prepared to reciprocate whatever sort of high-low shake fresh from abroad they give us. Since Dorothy Chase came back last fall she gives a side-to-side jerk that stops your breath short just where it happens to be at the moment. What do you suppose they'll be like? Young ladies from two years' residence in Germany, or just plain, jolly girls?" Josephine shook her head, but her mother replied in a quiet tone of conviction: "I doubt if the daughter of that family will be anything but a simple-mannered girl, no matter how experienced she may be in foreign usages." Sally nodded. "So I'm hoping. But 'Miss Carew'--with a voice--sounds more formidable. It's for Miss Carew I'm going to have afternoon tea. I'll go out now and make my little cakes. And I'll have very, very thin bread and butter. I've just one cherished jar of the choicest Orange Pekoe, so the tea will be above reproach. And my one pride is my linen--you know how much mother always kept--not only her own but Grandmother Rudd's." Then she vanished, quite suddenly, from the doorway, as if, having once mentioned the mother of whom she seldom spoke, she could not come back again to other subjects until a period of silence had intervened.