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Page 54
"Abracadabra!" cried Mary gamely. "May I hold on to the pole, and the
pole hold on to me till we've done all that's expected of us."
It was a dizzy moment for Mary, and a breathless one for all of them as
she swung head downward over the tottering pile of china and glass ware.
The china cupid was almost beyond her reach, but by a desperate effort
she managed to swing a fraction of an inch nearer, and seizing its head
in her mouth came up gasping and purple.
"Now what about being born in Mars' month!" she demanded triumphantly of
Elise as soon as she could get her breath. "A bloodstone will do more
for you any day than an agate."
Taking this as a challenge, all sorts of feats were attempted to prove
the superior virtues of each girl's birthstone charm, so that the
performance ended in a gale of romping and laughter. Then at the last,
to the tune of "They kept the pig in the parlour and that was Irish
too," Mary was gravely presented on behalf of the sorority with the gift
it had chosen for her.
"For your dowry," it was marked. It was a toy savings-bank in the form
of a china pig, with a slit in its back, into which each member dropped
seventeen pennies, as they sang in jolly chorus,
"Because it's your seventeenth birthday,
March seventeen shall be mirth-day.
Oh, may you long on the earth stay,
With pence a-plenty too."
"That's an example in mental arithmetic," cried A.O. "Quick, Mary! Tell
us how much your dowry amounts to. Seventeen times sixteen--"
But Mary was occupied with a discovery she had just made. "There are
just seventeen of us counting me!" she cried. "I never knew such a
strange coincidence in numbers."
"If you save all your pennies till you have occasion for a dowry you'll
have enough to buy a real pig," counselled Cornie wisely.
"More like a whole drove of them," laughed Mary. "That time is so far
off."
"Not necessarily so far," was Cornie's answer. "Sometimes it is only a
few steps farther when you are seventeen. Come on, before they turn out
the lights on us."
Mary stopped in the door to look back at the room in which they had
spent such a jolly evening. "I'd like to stop the clock right here," she
declared, "and stay just at this age for years and years. It's so nice
to be as _old_ as seventeen, and yet at the same time to be as _young_
as that."
Then she went skipping off to her room with the dowry pig in one hand
and a green candle from the cake in the other, to report the affair to
Ethelinda. They were not members of the same sorority, but they had many
interests in common now. They had learned how to adjust themselves to
each other. Mary still reserved her deepest confidences for her
shadow-chum, but Ethelinda shared the rest.
CHAPTER XI
TROUBLE FOR EVERYBODY
Up in Joyce's studio, Easter lilies had marked the time of year for
nearly a week. They had been ordered the day that Betty and Mary arrived
to spend the spring vacation, and still stood fresh and white at all the
windows, in the glory of their newly opened buds. They were Henrietta's
contribution. Mrs. Boyd and Lucy were away.
On the wall over the desk the calendar showed a fanciful figure of
Spring, dancing down a flower-strewn path, and Mary, opening her journal
for the first time since her arrival, paused to read the couplet at the
bottom of the calendar. Then she copied it at the top of the page which
she was about to fill with the doings of the last five days.
"How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers."
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