"It did look so good! I walked around the table, my mouth watering as I looked at the tarts and marmalade and spiced buns, and all the other tempting dishes. Mother watched me do it, and then, just before she invited the ladies out to the table, she sent me off to bed without a morsel to eat,--not even a spoonful of mush and milk. "I lay in an adjoining room, listening to the clatter of knives and forks, and the ladylike hum of conversation, and knew that the good things were slowly but surely disappearing, and that I could not have a taste. I was so hungry and disappointed that I cried myself to sleep. That disappointment and the lecture which followed next morning was punishment enough, and you may be sure that that was the last time I ever invited my mother's friends on my own responsibility." Mrs. Brewster paused amid the girls' laughing exclamations, and just then Mrs. Sherman came in from the train, hot and dusty, and her arms full of little packages. "Come on up to my room with me," she said to Mrs. Brewster, who was a frequent and familiar visitor at Locust. "Don't take her away," begged the Little Colonel, "she is entertaining us." "My turn now," laughed Mrs. Sherman. And the two ladies went up-stairs, once more leaving the girls to the task of providing their own amusement. "Wasn't that a picture?" said Joyce, when Mrs. Brewster had left the room. "Can't you just see it? that quaint little girl in her old-fashioned dress, going from door to door with her courtesies and her invitations, and, afterward, all the ladies coming down the stiff-bordered path between the rows of hollyhocks. I'd love to draw that picture if I could." "Try it," urged the girls, so warmly that Joyce went up-stairs for her drawing material. Betty watched her spread her paper on the library table. "I believe that I could put that story into rhyme," she said, after a few minutes of silent thought. "I can feel it humming in my head." "Oh, I didn't know that you could write poetry," exclaimed Lloyd. "Try it now, and see what you can do. You write the poem, and Joyce will illustrate it." "I have to be by myself when I write, and I never know how long it will take. It is like making butter. Sometimes it will come in a few minutes, and sometimes I have to churn away for hours."