The days and weeks seemed to fly by after that, each one full of
interest to Peggy, who liked Andrews better and better and was
increasingly glad each hour that she had come. Through Mr. Huntington's
help she was able to do a great many delightful things for other people,
and she took happy advantage of his warm interest in her projects.
December rushed along toward Christmas and Peggy began to feel just a
trifle sad because her aunt had written nothing about her coming home
for the holidays, while almost all the other girls were going. She
rather hated to think of the empty halls of Andrews in vacation time
with no company other than that of Mrs. Forest. But one day Katherine
had looked beamingly up from a letter and had then jumped up and thrown
her arms around Peggy's neck with the explanation that Peggy was invited
home with her by all of Katherine's folks.
Oh, what an enthusiastic preparation began then, what long discussions
as to whether to take the blue crepe de chine or the golden satin, what
oodles of postcards were dispatched to friends with the good news and
new temporary address on them!
To be part of the great business of going away for vacation! Peggy's
heart thrilled every time an expressman tramped through the halls
bearing some girl's trunk on his broad shoulders. Any afternoon now they
might come for her trunk, hers and Katherine's, packed delightfully in
one, after many friendly quarrels as to which one should have the left
hand tray and which the right and who could lay her shoes in the lower
compartment and which should take her manicure set, since one would do
for both girls, and trunk room was precious.
When, seated at last, breathless and full of anticipation, in a taxi
with their trunk up on top, the two girls waved through the window to
those who had not yet gone, Peggy was too happy to speak, and two bright
red spots burned in her dimpling cheeks and her eyes were as blue with
excitement as electric sparks.
She had never ridden on a train--a Pullman--before with just girls as
company. Her aunt had always taken her the few places she had been. Yet
now she was actually buying her ticket herself and checking her trunk,
and then boarding a great, wonderful, cross-country de luxe train,--she
and Katherine, all by themselves, with as grown-up _sang-froid_ as if
they had "all the while been conductors or brakemen," Katherine
expressed it joyously.
The porter put their suit-cases under their berths, and Peggy's little
gloved hand dropped a quarter nonchalantly into his palm while she tried
to twist her eager, excited mouth into a traveled expression.
"Well," murmured Katherine, settling back comfortably on the plush seat,
"we're really on our way. Oh, Peggy, I'm so glad you're going with
me--oh, won't it be fun to introduce you to father and mother and
brother Jack and the canary bird!"
They had taken an early afternoon train, and it was a long while to wait
for dinner. The wonder and glory of the dinner Peggy was already
picturing.
"I'm hungry just thinking about it," she said, when the train was well
under way.
"Let's have the porter get us something," suggested Katherine, "what
would you like--a lemonade?"
"OO-ooo," breathed Peggy, rapturously, "can he get it for us?"
"Why, you can order _anything_ on these good trains," declared Katherine
grandly. "A little later we'll get some cards and look up two girls to
play bridge--the train's full of our girls and people from the colleges.
Then we'll go back to the observation car and--"
Peggy shivered blissfully. "My," she said, "isn't life full of
experiences, though?"
----
"Shall we wear our hats into the diner, Peggy?" asked Katherine,
importantly, when the windows of the train were squares of blackness
speckled by flying snow whirling past and the waiter had gone through
calling out, "Dinner is served in the dining car in the rear ...
first-call."
"Is that the thing to do?" hesitated Peggy--"and must we wear our coats,
too? I'd rather put our hats into these paper hat bags the porter
brought a while ago, and leave our coats here, and--and just go back in
a real homelike appearance."
"All right," said Katherine, smoothing back her pretty hair before the
tiny oblong mirror in their section, "and, oh, Peggy, how hungry I am!"
With the excitement of a brand new experience shining in their eyes,
their youthful heads held erect as they walked, and their little serge
skirts swishing over their silk petticoats, the two girls went down the
aisle in growing and pleasant consciousness of being observed by many,
through car after car of the long train in their hungry search for the
diner.
Each of the vestibules was snow-powdered and slippery and cold--oh, so
cold, and it seemed that always just as they came to one the train
lurched and shook so as to nearly knock them off their feet.
And then, all of a sudden, there they were in the diner itself--but what
was this mob--this perfect horde of other people doing there standing
patiently lined up against the long narrow wall before they came to the
table part of the car?
"Katherine!" cried Peggy in consternation, "they're waiting to get in.
We'll _starve_ before our turn comes!"
And all the long patient row of people laughed, for nowhere else in
traveling is there a more open and friendly spirit than among those poor
patient and hungry sufferers lined up to wait their turn to be served at
dinner. Groups returning began to push by them after a while, their
faces as satisfied in expression as the others were anxious.
"You see," Katherine thought it out, "we came at the first call, but our
car was so far away that by the time we could get back here, all the
people from the nearer cars had gotten ahead of us."
But once seated facing each other at a little table, with the electric
candle shedding its radiant light on the white cloth before them, and
with the pale snow outside fluttering against the windows, and all so
warm and comfortable inside, the tedium of waiting was forgotten and all
things beyond the scope of the immediate attractive present were blotted
out from their contented spirits.
They leaned their elbows on the table and looked across at each other
with blissful satisfaction.
"Peggy," said Katherine, and "Katherine," began Peggy eagerly, and then
both in the same breath they demanded of each other the answer to the
momentous problem of the moment, "What are we going to eat?"
Never had a menu seemed as full of wonderful possibilities as that one,
never had "Milk-fed chicken with Virginia ham" tasted finer when it was
brought, and never, _never_ had two more healthy young appetites been
brought into play than Katherine and Peggy manifested while the train
rocked along with them at breakneck speed taking them faster and faster
and faster right into the heart of Christmas vacation.
After the edge of their hunger had been worn off and they had turned
their attention more delicately to ice cream and _demi-tasse_, their
thoughts drifted backward to events at Andrews, which seemed already
very much in the dim and distant past.
"Katherine, when you said you felt as if Mr. Huntington would soon find
his grandson, did you have any reason for saying that, or was it just to
comfort him?" Peggy inquired reminiscently.
"No, honestly, Peggy," insisted Katherine, "I could feel it in my mind
just like anything that it will happen. Did you notice I didn't say
anything about his daughter? That was because I had no such feeling
about her--so you see it wasn't just to make him feel better at all.
It's strange, isn't it, how thoughts about the future come to you
sometimes?"
"Never do to me," laughed Peggy with a shake of her head. "Just think,
Katherine, I didn't ever even have an idea until I actually saw you that
I was going to room with anyone like you at Andrews. When I used to
wonder what my room-mate would be like, I always thought of
some--entirely different kind of a person--and I was afraid maybe she'd
want the window shut when I wanted it open, or she'd be a grind and I'd
bother her,--and when I saw you--"
"Were you satisfied?" teased Katherine across the table.
"Oh--" sighed Peggy in mock rapture, and then she smiled her sweet,
frank, confident, dark-eyed smile straight into her room-mate's eyes. "I
was just about as glad as they make 'em," she declared.
Katherine was thinking.
After a while she spoke.
"I know what let's do," she said radiantly, "let's go to Madame Blakey
when we get to my house and ask her about the Huntington boy."
"Who's Madame Blakey?"
"Oh, I forgot you wouldn't know. She's a clairvoyant and reads the
future out of a little glass of water. Yes, and you needn't smile.
Sometimes it comes out just as she says. I've never been, but some of
the business men in our town believe in every word she says."
"I--I'd be afraid," Peggy demurred.
"She doesn't tell you the horrid things--just the ones worth while
knowing--don't you think it would be thrilling to go?" Katherine poised
her ice-cream spoon half way to her mouth while she waited for Peggy's
wild delight in the scheme which she felt sure must come.
"I--I--don't know--" Peggy disappointingly murmured. "Does she have
curtains painted with red and gold Turkish half-moons and all that? And
does she fade off into a--" she shuddered, "a--trance? Because I don't
want to see anything like that, honest, I don't. Of course, I know the
trances are just make-believe, but I don't like them."
"No," Katherine hastened to reassure her, "sometimes I think it would be
fun to go to one who did those things, but this one doesn't make much of
a show of it, I've heard, and if the folks would only let us go--"
"Perhaps we owe it to Mr. Huntington," Peggy decided at last, "to find
out where his grandson is for him, even by clairvoyant means like that.
Perhaps we ought not to let an opportunity or possible chance slip by--"
By this Katherine realized she had won her wish and that her little
friend was beginning to be as eager for the adventure as she was and was
merely trying to translate it into a favor to somebody else before
plunging into it heart and soul.
By this time the girls had finished their delightful dinner and they
left a quarter on the waiter's little tray with all the dignity in the
world. My, how independent, how experienced, how completely adult it
made them feel to be deciding the amount of tips and then handing them
out with such sweet grandeur of manner. The waiter smiled and bowed as
he pulled out their chairs, but they themselves were so exactly the type
of traveler that any waiter would prefer to wait on, with their grave
consultation with him as to the choicest dishes and their evident
enjoyment of life in general, that perhaps he would have been nearly as
polite had they given him only ten cents--but, of course, it's
impossible to say for sure. Waiters are but waiters, and they have
certain expectations and have grown accustomed to seeing them realized.
Back on the perilous journey through snow-coated vestibules the girls
took their swaying way, laughing light-heartedly at each swerve of the
train and trying to work out some Sherlock Holmes system by which they
might be sure of finding their own car.
"I knew a girl once," said Katherine, "whose car was taken off at
Buffalo and hitched to another train while she was promenading on the
platform outside, and all the baggage she had in the world went off to
school, leaving her behind. It was a horrible experience--"
"Must have been," sniggered Peggy, "but if you're trying to scare me
into thinking perhaps we won't find our car at all you'll have a hard
time of it, because we're in it now!"
And so they were. There were the familiar fur coats over the arms of the
Pullman seats at last, there were the copies of the gayly covered
magazines that they had left behind them, and, indeed, there it all
was--home. Home as only a Pullman car can be home to young people who
adore traveling and have plenty of interesting experiences and company
to while away the journey.
"Ah," they cried, sinking back into their seats, "this is nice, isn't
it, after all that walk? How smoothly the train runs when you're sitting
still, but how jogglety it goes when you walk through the cars."
"Oh, well," said Peggy, with a mighty yawn and stretching her little
locked hands before her lazily, "I'm perfectly happy, and I feel so
contented I'm almost--sleepy."
"Almost--" indignantly laughed Katherine, "I feel free to say that
you're the most perfect imitation of a sleepy head that I ever
saw--imitation, I said, Peggy, imitation--" she cried, ducking, for
Peggy had reached for her hair to pull it.
"Let's imitate sleeping heads instead of only sleepy ones then,"
suggested Peggy when all her attempts to wreak vengeance upon her
room-mate had proved unsuccessful.
"Porter, will you make up our section next?" asked Katherine as that
white-coated individual went by. And Peggy stored it away in her mind
that when you wanted to address him you called him "Porter." It was
difficult to explain exactly why, but this impressed her as just the
highest mark of knowing the proper thing that she had seen yet. Now if
_she_ had been forced to ask him the same question she had a feeling
that she would have begun with "Say."
"How shall we sleep--you in the upper, or me, or both of us in the lower
so that the upper needn't be let down at all and then we can have plenty
of room to dress in our berths in the morning without bumping our
heads."
Peggy agreed to this last plan as the best, and a few minutes later the
two snuggled down into the cold sheets to be lulled almost instantly to
sleep by the rhythmic motion of the train and the even sound of its
metal click, click on the rails.
"Good-night," murmured Peggy sleepily just before drifting off into the
great shining world of dreams with their marvelous adventures that do
not tire but rest and equip the dreamer afresh for the series of real
events crowding in with the new day.
"Goo--ood--night--" answered Katherine in an even drawlier tone, but her
room-mate was already asleep and did not notice it.