“Won’t it be perfectly splendid!” she exclaimed.  “I only wish I were going to do it instead of having to stay at that straight-up-and-down school and listen to Prissy’s dissertations on Emerson.  She told the Freshman class the other day that she had had the honor of meeting Mr. Emerson when very young—­when she was young, she meant; she always tells every Freshman class that, you know—­and one of the Freshies spoke up and asked if she ever met him afterwards when he was older.  They said her face was a picture; I wish I might have seen it.  But do tell me more about that wonderful store of yours.  I am sure it will be a darling, because anything you have anything to do with is sure to be.  Are you going to have a tea-room?”

Mary shook her head.  “No,” she said, laughing.  “I think not.  There’s too much competition.”

“Oh, but you ought to have one.  Not of the ordinary kind, you know, but the—­the other kind, the unusual kind.  Why, I have a cousin—­a second—­no, third cousin, a relative of Daddy’s, she is—­who hadn’t much money and whose health wasn’t good and the doctor sent her to live in the country.  Live there all the time!  Only fancy!  Oh, I forgot you were going to do the same thing.  Do forgive me!  I’m so sorry!  What a perfect gump I am!  Oh, dear me!  There I go again!  And I know you abhor slang, Mrs. Wyeth.”

“Tell me more about your cousin, Barbara,” put in Mary, before the shocked Mrs. Wyeth could reply.

“Oh, she went to the country and took an old house, the funniest old thing you ever saw.  And she put up the quaintest little sign!  And opened a tea-room and gift shop.  I don’t know why they call them ‘gift shops.’  They certainly don’t give away anything.  Far, far from that, my dear!  Daddy calls this one of Esther’s ‘The Robbers’ Roost’ because he says she charges forty cents for a gill of tea and two slices of toast cut in eight pieces.  But I tell him he doesn’t pay for the tea and toast alone—­it is the atmosphere of the place.  He says if he had to pay for all his atmosphere at that rate he would be asphyxiated in a few months.  But he admires Esther very much.  She makes heaps and heaps of money.”

“Then her tea-room and gift shop is a success?”

“A success!  Oh, my dear!  It’s a scream of a success!  Almost any day in summer there are at least a dozen motor cars outside the door.  Everybody goes there; it’s the proper thing to do.  I know all this because it isn’t very far from our summer home in Clayton—­in the mountains, you know.”

“So she made a success,” mused Mary.  “Were there other tea-rooms about?”

“Oh, dozens!  But they’re not original; hers is.  They haven’t the—­the something—­you know what I mean, Esther has the style, the knack, the—­I can’t say it, but you know.  And you would have it, too; I’m perfectly sure you would.”

Mary was evidently much interested.

“I wish I might meet your cousin,” she said.