When the girls were alone again, Sylvia stole a look at Judith and broke into noiseless giggles.  She laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks and she had to stop work and go to the kitchen sink to wash her face and take a drink of water.  “You never do what you say you’re going to,” said Judith, as gravely alien to this mood as to the other.  “I thought you said you’d scream.”

“I am screaming,” said Sylvia, wiping her eyes again.

They were very familiar with the work of preparing the simple “refreshments” for University gatherings.  Their mother always provided exactly the same viands, and long practice had made them letter-perfect in the moves to be made.  When they had finished portioning off the lettuce-leaves and salad on the plates, they swiftly set each one on a fresh crepe-paper napkin.  Sylvia professed an undying hatred for paper napkins.  “I don’t see why,” said Judith.  “They’re so much less bother than the other kind when you’re only going to use them once, this way.”  “That’s it,” asserted Sylvia; “that’s the very stingy, economical thing about them I hate, their not being a bother!  I’d like to use big, 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!”