g, fine-damask ones, all
shiny, that somebody had ironed twenty minutes, every one, like those
we had at Eleanor Hubert's birthday party. And then I'd scrunch them
up and throw them in the laundry if there was the least speck on
them."

"I wouldn't like the job of doing them up," said Judith.

"Neither would I. I'd hate it! And I wouldn't," continued Sylvia,
roaming at will in her enchanted garden; "I'd hire somebody to take
all the bother of buying them and hemming them and doing them up and
putting them on the table. All I'd do, would be to shake them out and
lay them across my lap," she went through a dainty-fingered pantomime,
"and never think a thing about how they got there. That's all _I_ want
to do with napkins. But I do love 'em big and glossy. I could _kiss_
them!"

Judith was almost alarmed at the wildness of Sylvia's imaginings.
"Why, you talk as though you didn't have good sense tonight, Sylvie.
It's the party. You always get so excited over parties." Judith
considered it a "come-down" to get excited over anything.

"Great Scotland! I guess I don't get excited over one of these
_student_ parties!" Sylvia repudiated the idea. "All Father's
'favorite students' are such rough-necks. And it makes me tired to
have all our freaks come out of their holes when we have company--Miss
Lindstroem and Mr. Hecht and Cousin Parnelia and all."

"The President comes," advanced Judith.

Sylvia was sweeping in her iconoclasm. "What if he does--old
fish-mouth! _He's_ nobody--he's a rough-neck himself. He used to be a
Baptist minister. He's only President because he can talk the hayseeds
in the Legislature into giving the University big appropriations. And
anyhow, he only comes here because he _has_ to--part of his job. He
doesn't like the freaks any better than I do. The last time he
was here, I heard Cousin Parnelia trying to persuade him to have
planchette write him a message from Abraham Lincoln. Isn't she the
limit, anyhow!"

The girls put off their aprons and slipped into the big, low-ceilinged
living-room, singing like a great sea-shell with thrilling
violin-tones. Old Reinhardt was playing the Kreutzer, with Professor
Marshall at the piano. Judith went quietly to sit near Professor
Kennedy, and Sylvia sat down near a window, leaning her head against
the pane as she listened, her eyes fixed on the blackness outside.
Her face cleared and brightened, like a cloudy liquor settling to
limpidity in a crystal vase. H