This morning Aunt Bettie came up my front steps before breakfast with a large basketful of things for my dinner, and I wondered what I would have collected to be served to those people by the time all my neighbours had made their prize contributions.  It took Aunt Bettie and Jane a half-hour to unpack her things and set them in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves.  One was a plump fruit-cake that had been keeping company, in a tight box, with other equally rich cakes ever since the New Year.  It was ripe, or smelt so.  It made me feel very hungry.

A little later Jane was exclaiming over a two-year-old ham that had been simmered in some wonderful liquor and larded with egg dressing, when Mrs. Johnson came in and began to unpack her basket.

I had planned to have a lot of food and had ordered some things up from a caterer in the city, but I telegraphed to them not to deliver them until the next day, even if they did spoil.  How could I use smelts when Mrs. Wade had sent me word that she was going to bake some brook trout by a recipe of the judge’s grandmother’s?  Mrs. Hampton Buford had let me know about two fat little summer turkeys she was going to stuff with chestnuts, and roast fowl seemed foolish eating beside them.  But when the little bit of a baby pig, roasted whole with an apple in its mouth, looking too frisky and innocent for worlds with his little baked tail curled up in the air, arrived from Mrs. Caruthers Cain, I went out into the garden and laughed at the idea of having spent money for lobsters.

When I got back in the kitchen things were well under way, everything smelling grand, and Aunt Bettie in full swing matching up my dinner guests.

“Nobody in this town could suit me better than Pet Buford for a daughter-in-law, and I believe I’ll have all the east rooms done up with blue chintz for her.  I think that would be the best thing to set off her blue eyes and fair hair,” she was saying as she cut orange peel into strips.

“You’ve planned the refurnishing of that east wing to suit the style of nearly every girl in Hillsboro since Tom put on long trousers, Bettie Pollard, and they are just as they have been for fifteen years since you did up the whole house,” said Mrs. Johnson as she poured a wine-glass half full from one bottle and added a tablespoonful from another.

“Well, I think he is really interested now from the way he spent most of his time with her down at the hotel the other night, and I have hopes I never had before.  Now, Molly, do put him between you and her, sort of cornered, so he can’t even see Ruth Clinton.  She is too old for him.”  And Tom’s mother looked at me over the orange-peel as to a confederate.

“Humph, I’d like to see you or Molly or any woman ‘corner’ Tom Pollard,” said Mrs. Johnson with a wry smile as she tasted the concoction in the wine-glass.

“I have to put him at the end of the table because he is my kinsman and the only host I’ve got at present, Aunt Bettie,” I said regretfully.  I always take every chance to rub in Tom’s and my relationship on Aunt Bettie, so that she won’t notice our friendliness.