ly touched a mouthful when she
remembered there was a girl from out of town who had come in to spend
a month doing nothing and had to be helped, but though she rushed to
the 'phone she couldn't get her friend before it was time to catch her
suburban train home; in order to do which she jumped into the station
'bus, only to remember she had forgotten to buy a ribbon for her
Siamese costume for the Benefit Ball; but it was too late now and she
spent her time, going out on the train, trying to think of some way of
getting along without it, and her head began to ache; but luckily she
met some of the girls on her way from the station to her high-school
sorority alumnae reunion and they began to tell her how to do it; but
she had to hurry away because she had promised to go to the house of
one of the girls and do stencil patterns, which started to be
beautiful, but before she could get any of them really done she
recollected that Chunk Brown had sent over a bunch of new songs and
was coming to call to-night and she had to scoot home and practice
"June time is moon time and tune time and spoon time," as well as "The
grass is blue o'er little Sue," till there was just one hour left
before dinner and she was perfectly crazy over the new "do" which one
of the girls had showed her and she rushed upstairs and went at that
"do" and by dinner time she had got it almost right, so that her
father told her always to do her hair like that and brother wished he
had it down at the factory to replace a broken dynamo brush, while as
for Chunk, he was nicer than ever till he learned he had to take her
to a rehearsal of the Siamese Group for the Benefit Ball: so that,
what with having to coax him to go and what with changing into her
costume, she got to the rehearsal so tired she couldn't stand up to
go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated
aesthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out
the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie
there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a
spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must
go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow,
which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which
pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two
periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting along the
spiral and into Culture pretty well, till it w