“Julia has never been to New York.  Won’t she be delicious?” I exclaimed as we came to her on the list.  Peter had put her first.

“Delicious is the right word,” said Peter, and he then launched forth in a description of Julia that I would hardly have recognized, though I had been born across the street from her and have loved her devotedly from our second years.  It is such a joy to have two people whom you love appreciative of each other, and I knew that Julia fully reciprocated Peter’s interested friendship for her.  She had wept on my shoulder at parting from Peter, and had written him long and encouraging letters for me while I was going up to Nashville to have my clothes made for the trip to New York and trying to get a little time in my garden out at The Briers.  I have to stop; I never let myself think of that parting with Sam and The Briers.  Some things are too deep for words.  Then to continue about Julia, I wrote her how to have her dresses made, but told her to get only one little traveling-hat and leave the rest to Mabel and me and Fifth Avenue.  I also advised Edith and Sue to do likewise, but I knew Miss Editha would have Miss Sally Pride make her a new bonnet on the frame of the old one, and Peter said she would not be the “wraith of an old rose” in anything else.

It was glorious that Tolly and Pink could both come, though Billy Robertson was not sure.  I did so hope that Clyde would get a real chance to open Edith’s kitten eyes for her through some heroic accident of travel, and I was glad that Colonel Menefee was coming, because he would engage Miss Editha’s attention away from Tolly’s attentions to Edith and give them a chance to come forward out of their backwardness.  The telephone scheme had failed, Tolly told me, because the wire chief had made a mistake and still left them connected at Central.  “Central” is the little Pride girl, the milliner’s youngest niece, and very pretty.  Just as he was ready to begin firmly with Edith she sweetly said: 

“Now your connection is good, Mr. Tolbot.”

When I left home poor Tolly was really becoming embittered against the world and was absorbing himself in putting up a new telephone line over to Spring Hill.  I told Peter how he ought to appreciate Tolly for leaving business in that state to come up for the first night of the play; and Peter said: 

“Dear old chap; we must find the shibboleth that will unleash the hooded falcon of his soul.”  Isn’t Peter wonderful?

If all the invited guests in Hayesboro were busy getting ready to do justice to the first night of “The Emergence,” we were in the same state.  Judge Vandyne was planning to give a dinner that night to his most distinguished lawyer friends in honor of Farrington, and daddy had promised to try to come.  Of course, Peter was going to have a dinner of his own, to which he was inviting a lot of delightful friends to meet his Hayesboro friends, and they were having