FullReads

“How shockingly Henry contradicts to-night,” was the only reply Nellie deigned to this long speech.

“What shall we call each other next Wednesday?” asked Mary. “By our first names, as now?”

“Not if we are going to be prophetically accurate,” said Henry. “Fifty years hence, in all probability, we shall, most of us, have altogether forgotten our present intimacies and formed others, quite inconceivable now. I can imagine Frank over there, scratching his bald head with his spectacle tips, and trying to recall me. ‘Hen. Long, Hen. Long,–let me think; name sounds familiar, and yet I can’t quite place him. Did n’t I know him at C——, or was it at college? Bless me, how forgetful I ‘m growing!'”

They all laughed at Henry’s bit of acting. Perhaps it was only sparkles of mirth, but it might have been glances of tender confidence that shot between certain pairs of eyes betokening something that feared not time. This is in no sort a love story, but such things can’t be wholly prevented.

The girls, however, protested that this talk about growing so utterly away from each other was too dismal for anything, and they would n’t believe it anyhow. The old-fashioned notions about eternal constancy were ever so much nicer. It gave them the cold shivers to hear Henry’s ante-mortem dissection of their friendship, and that young man was finally forced to admit that the members of the club would probably prove exceptions to the general rule in such matters. It was agreed, therefore, that they should appear to know each other at the old folks’ party.

“All you girls must, of course, be called ‘Mrs.’ instead of ‘Miss,'” suggested Frank, “though you will have to keep your own names, that is, unless you prefer to disclose any designs you may have upon other people’s; “for which piece of impertinence Nellie, who sat next him, boxed his ears,–for the reader must know that these young people were on a footing of entire familiarity and long intimacy.

“Do you know what time it is?” asked Mary, who, by virtue of the sweet sedateness of her disposition, was rather the monitress of the company.

“It’s twelve o’clock, an hour after the club’s curfew.”

“Well,” remarked Henry, rousing from the fit of abstraction in which he had been pursuing the subject of their previous discussion, “it was to be expected we should get a little mixed as to chronology over such talk as this.”

“With our watches set fifty years ahead, there ‘ll be no danger of overstaying our time next Wednesday, anyhow,” added Frank.

Soon the girls presented themselves in readiness for outdoors, and, in a pleasant gust of good-bys and parting jests, the party broke up.

“Good-by for fifty years,” Jessie called after them from the stoop, as the merry couples walked away in the moonlight.

The following week was one of numerous consultations among the girls. Grandmother Fellows’s wardrobe was pretty thoroughly rummaged under that good-natured old lady’s superintendence, and many were the queer effects of old garments upon young figures which surprised the steady-going mirror in her quiet chamber.

“I ‘m afraid I can never depend on it again,” said Mrs. Fellows.’

She had promised to be at the party.

“She looked so grave when I first asked her,” Mary explained to the girls, “that I was sorry I spoke of it. I was afraid she thought we wanted her only as a sort of convenience, to help out our pantomime by the effect of her white hair. But in a minute she smiled in her cheery way, and said, as if she saw right through me: ‘I suppose, my child, you think being old a sort of misfortune, like being hunchbacked or blind, and are afraid of hurting my feelings, but you need n’t be. The good Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won’t hurt your feelings to have somebody in the party who has got through all the troubles you have yet before you, I should be glad to come.’ That was turning the tables for us pretty neatly, eh, girls?”