The Tally-ho Tea-Shop was going to open a regular catering department. That was Betty’s “lovely new idea,” which had been her principal reason for coming back to Harding. Through the desperately busy first days of the term it had slumbered; the single-handed management of Montana Marie O’Toole had kept it in the background; the pathetic episode of the Jones sisters had delayed it still further. But when the B. C. A.’s stepped forward to share in the tutoring of Montana Marie, and when Jim Watson appeared to take Betty off on long, refreshing rides, and to remind her, by many small and tactful attentions, that at least one person in the world was tremendously interested in all her ideas and plans and achievements,—then at last did the lovely new idea for the Tally-ho get its innings. Betty took a day off from her freshman and her secretaryship, to think the whole thing over. Then she called a business meeting of “resident owners,” which was Madeline’s high-sounding name for herself and Babbie and Betty. Then she wrote to Mr. Morton, and saw to it that Babbie stopped thinking about Mr. Thayer and “the” wedding long enough to write to Mrs. Hildreth. And the next thing, since everybody heartily agreed about the splendor of the new idea, was to begin.

In this connection Betty enunciated another of her amusing business theories. “It’s easy enough to make grand and elegant plans,” she declared. “But there’s a perfectly awful gap between planning and doing. And in business it’s only the doing that counts.”

“Yes,” agreed Babbie solemnly. “Of course we want to wait until we are perfectly sure what is the very best way of starting in.”

Betty sighed despairingly. “Oh, Babbie, that’s just what I didn’t mean! I meant that the longer we think and consider and wonder how to begin, the longer,—we don’t begin,” she ended forlornly.

Madeline patted her shoulder comfortingly. “I understand, if Babbie, the lady of leisure, doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t! How can she, when she never has to make an opportunity, and then cram herself down its unwilling throat? Begin any old way, Betty. Only begin. I know the catering department will be a big success.”

And so Betty began—with Miss Raymond’s dinner. Miss Raymond had moved off the campus, and had a dear little house of her own, away up on the top of Oak Hill. Fräulein Wendt lived there with her, and a fat old French woman kept house for them—exactly as she pleased. And just as Betty was ready to open her catering establishment, a famous author from London came to Harding to deliver a lecture, and also to see Miss Raymond, whom he had met years before in England and wanted to meet again. Miss Raymond was giving a dinner for him. Celine’s cooking would do beautifully, she told Betty, coming to her to ask if Nora or Bridget knew of a waitress that she could have in for the great occasion. But Celine’s waiting and Celine’s table-laying—they would strike terror to his orderly English soul.

“I remember the dinners his sister used to give,” she went on. “Such perfect ones, with the loveliest flowers and the daintiest menu cards—you know they use menu cards over there, or they used to, where we should have place-cards—and after dinner just one lovely song or some other fascinating bit of entertainment to start the good talk going. If only I weren’t so busy! I simply can’t think of anything so frivolous as a dinner. Why couldn’t that provoking man have waited till the proofs of my new book were finished?”

Betty murmured polite sympathy, and then, when Miss Raymond had once more remembered her errand and looked suggestively at the door that led to Bridget and Nora, she bravely made the fatal plunge. Miss Raymond was a dreadful person to begin a thing on. She was hard to please. She never made allowances. She never explained what she wanted; she merely expected you to grasp her ideas with no help at all from her. But, as Madeline would have said, Miss Raymond was Opportunity knocking on the door of the Tally-ho Catering Department. A beginning was a beginning. So Betty plunged.

She explained the idea, and then timidly suggested that the new Catering Company should attempt to supply Celine’s deficiencies in the matter of decoration and service. And Miss Raymond, with a gasp of relief and a vague, “You know just the sort of charming thing I want,” fled joyously back to her neglected proofs, leaving Betty in a very perturbed, very mixed state of mind. She had got her longed-for chance to begin, but experimenting on Miss Raymond and a great English novelist certainly had its little drawbacks. Even Madeline was somewhat over-awed by the great name of the novelist, and Babbie Hildreth was frankly aghast at Betty’s daring.

“Couldn’t we have started in with a freshman spread?” she asked. “Then, after a year or so, we could work up to the grandeur of Miss Raymond. Aren’t you scared to death, Betty, for fear things will go wrong? Imagine how she’d glare at a waitress who didn’t pass things to suit her! The poor creature would probably drop her dishes and flee for her very life.”

“Not Nora,” said Betty stoutly. “I’m going to do the table myself, and I shall stay on in the kitchen during dinner to make sure that things are sent in looking right. Emily Davis will attend to that part later, but for this first time——”

“You are scared to death,” cried Babbie triumphantly. “But you needn’t be. It will be a howling success, that dinner. I feel it in my bones. And when Miss Raymond is pleased, she is very, very pleased. It will be the making of the Tally-ho Catering Department, Betty Wales, and I shall write Mother that you are the boldest and most fearless caterer in the whole country, and that she’d better engage you for our wedding without further delay.”

Betty laughed. “What you will really do without delay, Miss Hildreth, is to advise me about the flowers for the table, and the place-cards. Of course, for such a terribly intellectual party, our usual Tally-ho ideas are all out of the way.”

Babbie nodded thoughtfully. “Of course. She wants a perfectly dignified dinner. Keynote: expensive simplicity. Roses in a tall glass vase, and place-cards engraved with her family crest if she has one. Color scheme depending upon her china. Or has Celine smashed so much china that we shall have to use ours? You’ll have to conciliate the autocratic Celine, Betty; so you’d better be brushing up your French in your idle moments.”

“Don’t bother with French, but take me on your preliminary scouting trip,” amended Madeline. “I have yet to discover the fat foreign cook that I can’t conciliate. I love them so, that I instantly win their foolish hearts.”

The scouting trip disclosed the fact that Celine was good-natured, if set in her ways. Also, she had not smashed any of the gold and white Raymond-heirloom china. Instead she kept it under lock and key, and Miss Raymond and Fräulein Wendt were compelled to be satisfied with a plebeian, modern blue and white set purchased by command of the thrifty Celine, who had an obsession to the effect that some day Miss Raymond would marry and have a real home of her own. For this happy consummation Celine insisted upon hoarding the ancestral silver, china, and mahogany, sternly refusing to waste what she shrewdly recognized as real treasures upon this make-believe, makeshift housekeeping, divided between a drab little German lady and a distrait and absent-minded professor in petticoats, whom Celine adored and scolded by turns.

“And for ze grand partie, it is all as you wish,” she assured Betty magnificently. “It will do them gut—dis grand partie. I will make food for ze god, mam’selle, chust as you wish. Ze mam’selle, she is busy to-day—no count to disturb. She say do as ze little mam’selle wish, and all goes well. Voilà!”

So Babbie bought long-stemmed yellow roses, and borrowed Mary’s tallest and slenderest wedding-present vase to put them in. And when Betty demurred a little at the formidable price of engraved crests, Madeline painted the design in red and gold. Then, to amuse herself, she made another set of Tally-ho-ish cards with clever, flippant pictorial take-offs of the guests as decoration, and below leading questions, “just to start the good talk going,” she mimicked Miss Raymond gaily.

“I’d like to plan the great Mr. Joram a dinner,” she declared, “a real live American-college-girl dinner, that would make him sit up and like us all. I say, Betty, wouldn’t Miss Raymond stand for a little gleam of originality?”

Betty considered, looking troubled. “Of course those cards are terribly clever, and she might like them, but—if she didn’t——”

“Exactly,” Babbie took up the tale. “If she didn’t, the Tally-ho Catering Department would be done for. Miss Raymond is a woman of the world, Madeline. She met Mr. Joram in formal London society, and she wants to——”

“Do a perfectly good return engagement,” finished Madeline calmly. “All right, only she’s wasting the chance of a lifetime. Tell her so, please, Betty, with my compliments. To pay for a Tally-ho-ish dinner, and then get yellow roses and crests and regular food—it doesn’t strike me as a square deal. But if that’s what they want, that’s what we furnish. I must design a Tally-ho Catering Department folder, explaining that we are all things to all men, from a dignified dinner without features for Miss Raymond to a Stocking Factory Twelfth Night Masque, all features, for Mr. Thayer. By the way, Betty, we ought by rights to have begun on Mr. Thayer.”

“He’s too busy getting ready to be married,” laughed Betty. “He isn’t interested in factory parties this year.”

“Oh, dear, that’s because of me,” explained Babbie sadly. “But even a philanthropist has to be absorbingly interested in his new house and his approaching wedding and his honeymoon. After that,”—Babbie sighed joyously,—“after that you’ll have to help us and the Stocking Factory to live happy ever after. And we shall give lots of stunty parties, and we shall need lots of catering, with features.”

“Catering without features charged extra,” Madeline read from the folder she was busily composing, “to compensate the company for the loss of their customary diversions.”

“Madeline!” sighed Babbie resignedly. “What perfect foolishness! You know features are great bothers to think up.”

“Also great fun,” retorted Madeline. “And I’ll bet you a cookie—a frosted one of Cousin Kate’s—that even the intellectual Miss Raymond would like some features, if she only stopped to consider the matter.”

“But we can’t be sure that she would,” Betty explained again patiently. “And so isn’t it safer to act like any other Catering Company and stick to the Dignified Dinner program?”

“Certainly,” Madeline agreed promptly. “Keeping my terribly clever place-cards concealed about your person, and my latest Palmist and Crystal-gazer stunt on the other end of the Tally-ho’s telephone line. But I bet you a dozen Cousin Kate’s cookies that if she is given her choice, Miss Raymond will vote for the features.”

“I probably shan’t see her until after dinner,” Betty explained. “So she can’t be given her choice. But I’ll take the clever place-cards along. And if you can read palms, Madeline Ayres, begin on mine.”

“Oh, please do mine first,” begged Babbie, “and tell me all about my wedding and after. Why didn’t you tell us before that you could read palms?”

“Because I learned only last week,” Madeline defended herself coolly, and then proceeded to read all Babbie’s future in the lines of her soft little hands in a manner that Babbie and Betty agreed in characterizing as “just perfectly wonderful.”

The Dignified Dinner was to be at seven. At six Betty arrived to arrange the yellow roses, dispose the crested place-cards according to Miss Raymond’s orders, and make sure that Celine was doing her part and that Nora understood what hers was to be.

“My mam’selle is making ze letter in ze libraire,” Celine told her disconsolately. “She belong in ze chambre making ze toilette. Voilà! What is it to be done?”

“The salad—for us,” laughed Betty, and Celine joined in good-naturedly, only stopping now and then in the construction of the salad to reconnoiter in her mam’selle’s quarters and to lament that “ze toilette” was even yet not begun.

But at quarter to seven Miss Raymond, “ze toilette” completed, though rather sketchily, hurried into the kitchen.

“Oh, Miss Wales,” she began, “is everything ready? Did I tell you about the seating? Did I tell you that Professor Francis isn’t coming? So now I want Mrs. Merwin opposite Mr. Joram.” She swept back to the table. “It’s very pretty,” she said, gazing absently from the roses to the crests. “These cards are beautifully done. Did I ask you to plan music or something of the sort for later? But of course that’s not catering. I’m as nervous to-night as a freshman before mid-years—and as stupid. I simply haven’t had one minute to think since last Sunday. Do I look fit to be seen, Miss Wales? Oh, thank you. Hooking the hostess up isn’t catering either, but you do it so well. I’ll run up and find a pin to put into that lace in one minute. But first tell me, are any of my guests musical? Have they any parlor tricks? Intellectual dinners are such bores, Miss Wales, unless they’re made to be distinctive somehow.”

Overwhelmed by the tide of questions, Betty ran over the guest-list without finding any one whose “parlor trick” she knew.

“I’m sorry,” she faltered. “I didn’t know you wanted me to plan any entertainment. I thought——”

“Oh, never mind,” Miss Raymond cut in abruptly. “The table is very nice and Celine’s cooking—it’s all right, Miss Wales, only I’d dreamed of something—what is it that you girls say?—stunty. Something that would be like your tea-shop, and that would give Mr. Joram a whiff of the informal, amusing college atmosphere. I ought to have said so plainly. I never make myself clear.” Miss Raymond sank into the nearest chair with an air of complete discouragement.

For one little minute Betty hesitated. Then she flew to the kitchen and returned with the terribly clever place-cards, which had been packed in the basket with Mary’s vase.

“I’ll bring you down a pin,” she volunteered, “if you’ll tell me where to find one. Meanwhile look these over and see if you care to use them. Madeline—Miss Ayres—sent them on the chance. And if you wanted a splendid palmist and crystal-gazer for after dinner, you could have her. The costume is East Indian, with a mystic veil. We would have asked sooner, only we thought—we were afraid——” Betty fled, blushing. There was no use waiting for directions about the pin, because Miss Raymond was bestowing her undivided attention upon the new place-cards.

When Betty came back five minutes later she peeped cautiously in at the door to discover Miss Raymond happily engaged in rearranging the table, chuckling softly to herself as she moved about. Betty, who had found Fräulein Wendt and a pearl and amethyst pin, came timidly forward. Miss Raymond looked up at her with an expression of girlish gaiety that made you forget that she was ever cold and distant and hard to please.

“My dear child,” she said, “you’ve made my dinner! These cards hit them all off to the life. Nothing else will matter after such a good start, but bring on your crystal-gazing palmist. Put her in the little red sitting-room. Arrange things as you like. And—Mr. Joram will want to meet Miss Ayres. Couldn’t you ask her to come up later this evening?”

Betty started to explain that Miss Raymond must choose between Madeline and the crystal-gazing palmist, and then remembered the point Madeline had made of the mystic veil that was to keep her interestingly anonymous.

So, “I’m afraid she can’t come to-night, Miss Raymond,” Betty explained demurely. “That is, not until very late. I—I think she’s engaged for to-night.”

“Then I want to engage your catering company for another dinner next week, when Mr. Joram comes back. I’ll let you know the night, and Miss Ayres must come then for dinner.”

Three hours later Betty, tired but triumphant, was assisting the crystal-gazing palmist to extract the pins from the entangling meshes of her mystic veil. The crystal-gazing palmist was also triumphant. Nobody had pierced the disguise of the mystic veil. Miss Raymond had told Mr. Joram all about that queer amusing Miss Ayres, who stopped writing plays for Agatha Dwight to design candle shades for the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. Mr. Joram had inquired sotto voce of the palmist if faculty dinners at Harding were always like this one. Miss Ferris had blushed ignominiously when the palmist found a wedding within a year in her hand. Best of all, George Garrison Hinsdale—Mary fortunately was spending the week with Babe—had assured the palmist solemnly that her character readings were “simply stunning.”

“It wasn’t a very dignified dinner,” said Betty, pulling out the last pin, just as a fresh burst of laughter floated out from the rooms in front.

Madeline smiled. “Rather not—nor intellectual. But they’ve had a good time. By the way, may I collect my cookies as I go home? I’ve decided to sit up and write for a while, and I shall need midnight refreshments.”

“Of course you can have them or anything else we’ve got,” Betty promised gratefully. “Oh, Madeline, you are a jewel! Just suppose we hadn’t had any substitutes for crests and—and—dignity.”

Madeline yawned. “Before I write the play that I’m going to do to-night,” she announced casually, “I’ll amend our advertising circular. I’m going to cross out ‘Catering without Features charged extra,’ and say ‘Catering without Features may be had elsewhere.’”

“But that will sound fearfully unbusinesslike,” Betty protested.

“Business,” began Madeline dogmatically, “is the art of putting your best foot forward. Our best foot is features. Business is giving the people what they want. They all want features, even the touch-me-not Raymonds and the high and mighty Jorams. Ergo——” she waved her mystic veil convincingly. “You began with features, Betty. You’re therefore committed to features. And I, crystal-gazing palmist and seeress of renown, prophesy that the Tally-ho Catering Department will succeed beyond our wildest dreams, with features. Now come and help me find those cookies.”