The knock was repeated, and Ma went to the door. Charley was there, but he would not come in. Ma took an envelope that he handed her, and shut the door.
“This is for you, Laura,” she said.
Carrie and Grace looked on wide-eyed, and Pa and Ma waited while Laura read the address on the envelope. “Miss Laura Ingalls, De Smet, Dakota Territory.”
“Why, what in the world,” she said. She slit the envelope carefully with a hairpin and drew out a folded sheet of gilt-edged notepaper. She unfolded it and read aloud.
Ben M. Woodworth
requests the pleasure of
your company at his home
Saturday Evening January 28th
Supper at Eight o’clock
Just as Ma sometimes did, Laura sat limply down. Ma took the invitation from her hand and read it again.
“It’s a party,” Ma said. “A supper party.”
“Oh, Laura! You’re asked to a party!” Carrie exclaimed. Then she asked, “What is a party like?”
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Oh, Ma, what will I do? I never went to a party. How must I behave at a party?”
“You have been taught how to behave wherever you are, Laura,” Ma replied. “You need only behave properly, as you know how to do.”
No doubt this was true, but it was no comfort to Laura.
Chapter 20
The Birthday Party
All the next week Laura thought of the party. She wanted to go and she did not want to. Once, long ago when she was a little girl, she had gone to Nellie Oleson’s party, but that was a little girl’s party. This would be different.
At school Ida and Mary Power were excited about it. Arthur had told Minnie that it would be a birthday party, for Ben’s birthday. From politeness they could hardly say a word about it, because Nellie was with them at recess, and Nellie had not been invited. She could not have come, because she lived in the country.
On the night of the party, Laura was dressed and ready at seven o’clock. Mary Power was coming to go with her to the depot, but she would not come for half an hour yet.
Laura tried to read again her favorite of Tennyson’s poems,
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad
And the musk of the rose is blown.
She could not sit still. She took one more look into the looking glass that hung on the wall. She wished so much to be tall and slim that she almost hoped to see a slender, tall girl. But in the glass she saw a small, round girl in a Sunday-best dress of blue cashmere.
At least it was a young lady’s dress, so long that it hid the high tops of her buttoned shoes. The full-gathered skirt was gathered as full in the back as it could possibly be. Over it fitted the tight basque that came down in points in front and in back, and buttoned snugly with little green buttons straight up the front. A band of blue-and-gold-and-green plaid went around the skirt just above the hem, and narrow strips of plaid edged the pointed bottom of the basque and went around the wrists of the tight, long sleeves. The upstanding collar was of the plaid, with a frill of white lace inside it, and Ma had lent Laura her pearl-shell pin to fasten the collar together under her chin.
Laura could not find one fault with the dress. But, oh! how she wished she were tall and willowy, like Nellie Oleson. Her waist was as round as a young tree, her arms were slender but round, too, and her very small hands were rather plump and capable-looking. They were not thin and languid like Nellie’s hands.