But the dining-room is much nicer.  We have flowers on the table, and the cooking is better, though we still have prunes.

I loathe prunes.

V

“Here comes the bride!”

I knew when Miss Katherine left I’d be nothing but Martha.  That’s what
I’ve been—­Martha.

She hadn’t been gone two days when Mary gave up, and as prompt as possible Martha invented trouble.

It was this way.  In the summer we have much more time than in the winter, and the children kept coming to me asking me to make up something, and all of a sudden a play came in my mind.  I just love acting.  The play was to be the marriage of Dr. Rudd and Miss Bray.

You see, Miss Bray is dead in love with Dr. Rudd—­really addled about him.  And whenever he comes to see any of the children who are sick she is so solicitous and sweet and smiley that we call her, to ourselves, Ipecac Mollie.  Other days, plain Mollie Cottontail.  It seemed to me if we could just think him into marrying her, it would be the best work we’d ever done, and I thought it was worth trying.

They say if you just think and think and think about a thing you can make somebody else think about it, too.  And not liking Dr. Rudd, we didn’t mind thinking her on him, and so we began.  Every day we’d meet for an hour and think together, and each one promised to think single, and in between times we got ready.

Becky Drake says love goes hard late in life, and sometimes touches the brain.  Maybe that accounts for Miss Bray.

She is fifty-three years old, and all frazzled out and done up with adjuncts.  But Dr. Rudd, being a man with not even usual sense, and awful conceited, don’t see what we see, and swallows easy.  Men are funny—­funny as some women.

I don’t think he’s ever thought of courting Miss Bray.  But she’s thought of it, and for once we truly tried to help her.

Well, we got ready, beginning two days after Miss Katherine left, and the play came off Friday night, the third of July.  In consequence of that play I have been in a retreat, and on the Fourth of July I made a New-Year resolution.

I resolved I would do those things I should not do, and leave undone the things I should.  I would not disappoint Miss Bray.  She looked for things in me to worry her.  She should find them.

Well, I was in that top-story summer-resort for ten days.  Put there for reflection.  I reflected.  And on the difference between Miss Katherine and Miss Bray.

But the play was a corker; it certainly was.  We chose Friday night because Miss Jones always takes tea with her aunt that night, and Miss Bray goes to choir practising.  I wish everybody could hear her sing!  Gabriel ought to engage her to wake the dead, only they’d want to die again.

Dr. Rudd is in the choir, and she just lives on having Friday nights to look forward to.