The Automobile Girls at Newport Part 7

"It's Mrs. Cartwright," she said. "I am so pleased! I didn't suppose you would remember me."

"Of course I remember you, Ruth," Mrs. Cartwright protested. "It has been only two years since I saw you at my own wedding in Chicago. My memory is surely longer than that. Isn't that your aunt, Miss Stuart?"

Mrs. Cartwright moved across the aisle to speak to Miss Sallie and to introduce her husband. When they had shaken hands, Mrs. Cartwright asked: "May I know what you are doing in this part of the world at this season?"

"I am playing chaperon to my madcap niece and her three friends, who are doing an automobile trip to Newport without a man. Ruth is her own chauffeur," Miss Sallie explained, laughing.

"How jolly of you, Ruth, and how clever! I am so glad you are going to Newport. Did you know my summer place is down there? I am only in town for a day or two. My husband had to come on business and I am with him.

We shall be motoring home, soon, and may pa.s.s you if you are to take things slowly. Why not join me at New Haven? My husband's brother is a junior at Yale, and we've promised to stop there for a day. There is a dance on at Alumni Hall. I'd be too popular for words if I could take you four pretty girls along with me!"

Ruth turned to her aunt with glowing eyes. "We did want to see the college dreadfully," she said. "I have never seen a big Eastern university. We didn't dream of knowing anybody who would show us around.

Wouldn't it be too much for you to have us all on your hands?"

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Cartwright, "but a most decided pleasure. I shall meet you in New Haven, say, day after to-morrow, and I'll telegraph to-night to my brother, whose name is Donald Cartwright, by the way, to expect us."

The music was about to begin again, but, before Mrs. Cartwright went over to her seat, she put her hand on Mollie's curls. "I must see this little girl often at Newport. Then I can thank her better for saving my lovely b.u.t.terfly for me. I hope to make all of you have a beautiful time." She put the jewel into her hair again, and Mollie looked at it thoughtfully. She was to know it again some day, under stranger circ.u.mstances.

CHAPTER VII-SHOWING THEIR METTLE

"Girls!" Aunt Sallie said solemnly next morning, as Mr. Cartwright and two footmen helped her into the motor car, while Barbara, Grace and Mollie stood around holding her extra veils, her magazines and pocketbook. "I feel, in my bones, that it is going to rain to-day. I think we had better stay in town."

"Oh, Aunt Sallie!" Ruth's hand was already on the spark of her steering wheel, and she was bouncing up and down on her seat in her impatience to be off. "It's simply a splendid day! Look at the sun!" She leaned over to Mr. Cartwright. "Do say something to cheer Aunt Sallie up. If she loses her nerve now, we'll never have our trip."

Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright both rea.s.sured her. "The paper says clear weather and light winds, Miss Stuart. You'll have a beautiful day of it.

Remember we shall meet you in New Haven to-morrow, and you have promised to wait for us."

Aunt Sallie settled herself resignedly into her violet cushions, holding her smelling bottle to her nose. "Very well, young people, have it your own way," she relented. "But, mark my words, it will rain before night.

I have a shoulderblade that is a better weather prophet than all your bureaus."

"You're much too handsome a woman," laughed Ruth, the other girls joining her, "to talk like Katisha, in the 'Mikado,' who had the famous shoulderblade that people came miles to see."

Ruth was steering her car through Fifth Avenue, so Aunt Sallie merely smiled at her own expense, adding: "You're a very disrespectful niece, Ruth."

"I'd get on my knees to apologize, Auntie," declared Ruth, "only there isn't room, and we'd certainly be run into, if I did."

Barbara was poring over the route book. Her duty as guide to the automobile party really began to-day, and she was studying every inch of the road map. What would she do if they were lost?

"You may look up from that book just once in every fifteen minutes, Guide Thurston," Ruth said, pretending to be serious over Barbara's worried look. "We promise not to eat you if you do get us a little out of our way. The roads are well posted. What shall we do if we meet some bandits?"

"Leave them to me," boasted Barbara. "I suppose it's my fate to play man of the party."

"And what of the chauffeur?" Ruth protested. "I wonder what any of us could do if we got into danger."

The day was apparently lovely. The girls were in the wildest spirits.

"I never believed until this minute," announced Mollie, "that we were actually going on the trip to Newport. I felt every moment something would happen to stop us. I even dreamed, last night, that we met a great giant in the road, and he roared at us, 'I never allow red motor cars with bra.s.s tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs to pa.s.s along this road!' Ruth wouldn't pay the least attention to him, but kept straight ahead, until he picked up the car and started to pitch us over in a ditch. Then Ruth cried: 'Hold on there! If you won't let a red car pa.s.s, I'll go back to town and have mine painted green. I must have my trip.' Just as she turned around and started back, I woke up. Wasn't it awful?"

"You are a goose," said Grace, rather nervously. "It isn't a sign of anything, is it? You ought not to tell your dreams after breakfast. You may make them come true."

Barbara and Ruth both shouted with laughter, for Mollie answered just as seriously: "You're wrong, Grace; it's telling dreams before breakfast that makes them come true. I was particularly careful to wait."

The car pa.s.sed swiftly through the town in the early morning. Soon the spires and towers of the city were no longer visible.

"Hurrah for the Boston Post Road!" sang Barbara, as the car swung into the famous old highway.

"And hurrah for Barbara for discovering it!" teased Ruth. "Now, clear the track, fellow autoists and slow coach drivers! We know where we're going, and we're on the way!"

It had been decided to make a straight trip through to New Haven, and to wait there for Mrs. Cartwright. Miss Sallie had insisted on some rest, and the girls were wild to see the college-and the college men.

"It will be sure enough sport," Ruth confided, "to have one dance with all the partners needed to go round." Men were as scarce at the Kingsbridge Hotel as they were in other summer resorts, and Ruth was tired of Harry Townsend and his kind, who liked to stay around the hotel, making eyes at all the girls they saw.

"Yes," said Barbara thoughtfully, "it will be fun. Yet, Ruth, suppose we are sticks and no one dances with us?" Barbara didn't like the thought of being a wall-flower. Ruth laughed and quickly replied, "Oh, Mrs.

Cartwright is awfully jolly and popular, so we will have plenty of invitations to dance."

"Ruth," said Miss Sallie, a little after noon, when they had pa.s.sed, without a hitch, through a number of beautiful Connecticut towns, and were speeding along an open road, with a view of the waters of Long Island Sound to the right of them, "I have not looked at my watch lately, but I've an impression I am hungry. As long as we have made up our minds to eat the luncheon the hotel has put up for us, why not stop along the road here, and have a picnic?"

"Good for you, Aunt Sallie!" said Grace, emphatically. "This is a beauty place. Ruth can leave the car right here, and we can go up under that elm and make tea. What larks!"

The girls all piled out, carrying the big lunch hamper between them. On the stump of an old tree the alcohol lamp was set up and tea was quickly brewed. Then the girls formed a circle on the ground, while Miss Sallie, from her throne of violet silk pillows, gave directions about setting the lunch table.

No one noticed how the time pa.s.sed. No one could notice, all were having such a jolly time; even Miss Sallie was now in excellent spirits. She had been in Newport several times before, and the girls were full of questions.

Mollie leaned her head against Miss Sallie's knee, so intimate had she grown in a day and a half with that awe-inspiring person. "Is it true,"

she inquired in a voice of reverence, "that every person who lives in Newport is a millionaire?"

"And are the streets paved with gold, Miss Sallie?" queried Grace. She was Mollie's special friend, and fond of teasing her. "I read that the water at Bailey's Beach is perfumed every morning before the ladies go in bathing, and that all the fish that come from near there taste like cologne."

Miss Sallie laughed. "There are some people at Newport who are not summer people," she explained. "You must remember that it is an old New England town, and there are thousands of people who live there the year around. My brother has persuaded some old friends of ours, who used to be very wealthy when I was a girl, to take us to board with them. There are very few hotels."

Several times during their talk Ruth's eyes had wandered a little anxiously to the sky above them. Every now and then the shadows darkened under the old elm where they were eating their luncheon, bringing a sudden coolness to the summer atmosphere.

"Aunt Sallie made me nervous about the weather with that story of her shoulderblade," Ruth argued with herself. So she was the first to say: "Come, we had better be off. What a lot of time we've wasted!"

"No hurry, Ruth," Aunt Sallie answered, placidly. "New Haven is no great distance. We shall be there before dark."

It was fully half after two before the automobile girls had gathered up their belongings and were again comfortably disposed in the car.

"It certainly is great, Ruth, the way you crank up your own car," Grace declared. "It must take an awful lot of strength, doesn't it?"

"Yes," admitted Ruth, as she jumped back into her automobile and the car plunged on ahead. "But I've a strong right arm. I don't row and play tennis for nothing. Father says it takes skill and courage, as well as strength, to drive a car. I hope I'm not boasting; it's only that father believes girls should attempt to do things as well as boys. Girls could do a lot more if they tried harder. 'Sometimes,' Dad says, 'gumption counts for more than brute force.'"

"Whew, Ruth! You talk like a suffragette," objected Grace.

"Well, maybe I am one," said Ruth. "I'm from the West, where they raise strong-minded women. What do you say, Barbara?"