is the mail?” Lynn asked now.
“Oh, around some place,” Dodie replied helpfully. She glanced down the street and caught sight of Janie. “Hi there! My, what a pile of records! You must have bought out Nassau.”
Lynn sighed and turned to go into the house.
Everyone always said, “How nice it must be for you to have a sister just a year younger; somebody to share everything with!”
Well, it would be nice, Lynn thought, if only that were the way it was. But it isn’t—not with Dodie. We have hardly anything in common.
Pausing in the hall, she caught sight of a little pile of mail on the table. Thumbing through it, she quickly located the two letters that were addressed to her.
She opened the one from Paul first. It was the first letter she had ever received from him, and she gazed half-shyly at the hasty, boyish scrawl which would be all that would represent Paul to her until he returned at Christmas time. It was funny to know and care for someone as much as she did for Paul, and yet have his handwriting such an unfamiliar thing. It was like seeing a part of him she had never seen before, meeting and getting to know him in a different way.
After reading the first paragraph, she sighed in relief, for, strange as the handwriting seemed to her, the letter was Paul all over.
Hi, honey! Here I am. It’s a great place, but gee, I miss you. The trip up was a tough one. We drove right on through the night like we said we would, but we still didn’t make the time we hoped for because we had a flat tire and then something went wrong with the radiator. We got the tire changed without much trouble, but you should have seen us trying to patch that radiator up with chewing gum, especially since neither Ernie nor I can stand the darned stuff. There we were, chewing away, with these awful expressions on our faces. People who passed by must have thought we were crazy.
Ern and I have a room together. Not much to it except a couple of beds and a desk. Ernie already has Nancy’s picture stuck on his side of the desk, and my side looks pretty empty. Why not help me fill it by sending me a picture of my girl?
Lynn smiled and turned over the page. It was nice that Paul wrote such a good letter. It made him seem closer somehow. She read with interest his account of the first days of classes, of the beanies the freshmen had to wear, of the piles of books which were now residing on the shelf beside his bed.
The letter ended:
How’s my ring doing? What I said the day we left—I meant it, you know. I miss you so darned much. Love—Paul.
After the heavier envelope, the small white one beside it felt as though it could not contain a thing. It did, however. As Dodie had anticipated, it was the exciting invitation. Lynn Chambers was being officially invited to participate, as a Rivertown debutante, in the Presentation Ball in the spring and in all the parties and festivities leading up to it during the year.
It will be fun, Lynn thought happily, sliding the card back into the envelope and dropping it into her skirt pocket. She felt like showing it to someone, but her father was at his office and her mother did not seem to be around, either. Wandering into the kitchen, Lynn found out from Rosalie, who was busily peeling carrots for dinner, that Mrs. Chambers was at a Hospital Auxiliary meeting.
Dodie was in her room with Janie, playing records. Lynn could hear them laughing together as she passed the door, but there was no sense of breaking in to show the invitation to Dodie. She knew all about it already.
Stopping at the second-floor telephone, Lynn called Nancy. “Hi! Did your invitation come?”
“Sure did! Impressive, aren’t they! And I got a letter from Ernie, too.”
“Swell! My family will be burned up when they hear that. They haven’t even had a postcard from him.”
The two girls chatted for about twenty minutes and then Nancy rang off because she wanted to wash her hair before dinner. Lynn replaced the receiver and wandered aimlessly into her bedroom. She decided to begin a letter to Paul.
She had nearly finished it when Rosalie announced that dinner was ready.
There were candles on the dinner table. It was one of the few things that Mrs. Chambers insisted upon, and, although her father scoffed at it, Lynn thought it a lovely custom. It gave the dining room warmth and grace and a kind of old-time charm. Beneath his laughing protests, she knew her father liked it, too.
The rest of the family was already at the table when Lynn slid into her seat. Her mother turned to her with a smile.
“Well, how was the first day of school? How does it feel to be a senior?”
“Not too different from being a junior,” Lynn admitted. “One thing is going to be different, though. Your daughter is not only a senior this year; she is going to be a debutante.”
“A debutante!” Her father looked up at the words. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“No,” Lynn said, laughing at the surprise on his face, “and I hadn’t either until today. Mrs. Peterson is organizing it. They told me about it at school, and then the invitation came this afternoon.” She pulled the small white envelope from her pocket and slid it across the table, then turned to help herself from the plateful of rolls Rosalie was serving. “Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun. Nancy will be one, too.”
Her father read the invitation and handed it, wordlessly, to her mother.
Mrs. Chambers read it and laid it aside, saying, “This is a brand new thing, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a debutante in Rivertown before.”
“It sounds like something,” Dr. Chambers growled, “that that foolish Peterson woman would come up with.”
“Why, Daddy,” Lynn exclaimed in amazement, “you sound as though you don’t like the idea!”
“I don’t,” her father said shortly. “There’s enough class consciousness in this town already without starting something like this.”
Lynn was too surprised to answer. She turned to her mother.
“Mother—”
“It does sound like Mrs. Peterson,” Mrs. Chambers said slowly. “She’s such an organizer. I suppose, being from Philadelphia and all that, she feels that making a debut is about the most important thing in a girl’s life. She probably doesn’t want Brenda to miss the experience.”
“Brenda!” Dodie snorted disdainfully from her side of the table. “Brenda Peterson is a class ‘A’ drip, and no debut is going to make her anything else.”
Mrs. Chambers shook her head disapprovingly at her younger daughter. “Dodie, that’s a horrid way to talk! You don’t really know the Peterson girl. After all, she’s in Lynn’s class, not yours.”
“I don’t care whose class she’s in,” Dodie said decidedly. “She’s a drip and everybody in school knows it. Why, she wouldn’t be invited to anything if they didn’t live at the top of the Hill and her mother wasn’t head of every woman’s club in town.”
“Mrs. Peterson is the head of a lot of things,”
