The Easter holidays over, Mrs. Marriott and Bob took their departure but not before Bob had claimed Joanne as a sister and the two promised to write regularly.
“You may find it hard to read my first letter,” acknowledged Joanne a little ruefully. “I have such a horrid way of disconnecting my words, so one doesn’t know where the letters belong, but I mean to have them all joined up properly by this time next year, see if I don’t.”
“Go to it, sister,” said Bob. “I’ll bank on your coming out on top.”
But for the fact that school work began again after the holidays Joanne would have missed the Marriotts, mother and son, sorely, but she had little time for repining. She had never been able quite to catch up with her class in mathematics and was giving extra time to this branch, then, too, while she was now a First Class Scout, there was that goal of Golden Eaglet ahead, and she was fired with new ambition to win it before fall.
This year there was no reversal of Mrs. Selden’s decision to go to Jamestown for the summer, so farewell to any hope of Joanne’s for camping with her troop. To be sure Winnie, too, would be away up in Maine for the season, and had asked Joanne to visit her. So far Mrs. Selden had not favored the idea, but Joanne was not urging it, hoping that her grandmother might be brought around in course of time. In spite of prospects not altogether happy, however, Joanne was not looking forward this year with the same discontent which had marked the previous year. Weeping because things did not go her way was not to be thought of in a girl now in her sixteenth year.
“I would be thoroughly ashamed of myself if I went all to pieces,” she confided to Claudia. “I think, too, Gradda is beginning to respect my years. She speaks of sixteen as quite a grown-up age. She was beginning to have beaux herself when she was seventeen, and her mother was married at that age.”
“But you are not beginning to want beaux, are you?” asked Claudia slyly.
Joanne stared. “I? Heavens, no. I like my boy friends, but I should want to escape into the wilderness if any one suggested that any one of them was getting sentimental. Don’t say such things, Clausie; it gives me the cold shivers.”
Claudia laughed. “I’m not suggesting anything, bless your heart; I was only probing to learn where you stood. I feel just as you do.”
“Grad still treats me as if I were an infant,” Joanne went on, “but he takes more interest in my doings. He’s different, you see. Gradda likes to talk about clothes and fancy work and society doings, but she is bored to extinction when I talk about Girl Scout stunts. She is a dear old-fashioned thing, but she isn’t exactly congenial. Speaking of Girl Scouts, Clausie, I’m getting awfully discouraged about ever being a Golden Eaglet.”