“Do? I'll tell you what we can do. We can board the company! We can fill up the rooms with folks that pay for what they eat, an' there won't be any room for the free prowlers. You git the boarders an' I'll manage 'em.”
“Why, Mrs. Ivy and Gerald wanted to come that way, but I laughed at them. Besides I don't know about Gerald—”
“On account of Miss Connie?” asked Myrtella, who had been too much in charge of the family not to know its secrets. “You let him come. He's one of them men that's like vanilla extract—you git too much of him onct, you never want no more!”
“And perhaps Mr. Gooch would come.”
“Well it would go kinder hard with him to pay fer anything he's always got free. But git Miss Hattie to ast him. He'd do it fer her quicker'n anybody.”
The project, under Myrtella's able generalship, developed immediately. Mr. Gooch and the Ivys gladly availed themselves of the opportunity of fleeing from the stifling city to the cool shade of Thornwood. Two former pupils of the Doctor's, who were taking a summer course at the university, also asked if they might have a room, and at the end of a week paying guests were in possession and the family relegated to any nook or corner that was large enough to accommodate a bed.
One problem was unexpectedly solved by the appearance of Uncle Jimpson, who announced that “he had done come back home to stay.” The distinction of driving forth daily in solitary grandeur to exercise the Sequins' horses, had palled upon him, and the prospect of conducting the Queerington boarders back and forth to the station, and renewing his intimacy with old John and Mike, had proven irresistible.
Aunt Caroline had died in the early spring, and Uncle Jimpson found even the society of Myrtella a relief after his enforced loneliness. He listened with bulging eyes and sagging jaw to her accounts of the latest murders and obeyed her slightest command with a briskness that would have amazed the old Colonel.
“We's helpin' Miss Lady git a start,” he would say proudly again and again, “an' then maybe she git married some more.”
“Married!” Myrtella would flare, “yes, she orter git married to another widower with three children, and a thousand kin folks. Besides, who's she going to marry?”