“Oh, Joanne, but we shall be at Jamestown by July,” her grandmother spoke. “I heard from Mrs. Abercrombie only this morning. The Admiral will spend the summer there, and they are counting on our coming.”
“Oh, but Gradda, I don’t want to go to any of those stupid watering places and I don’t see why I have to.”
“My dear, of course you have to. Do you suppose I would think of leaving you behind? The idea is preposterous. I shouldn’t spend a peaceful moment.”
“But why, Gradda, why?” The old fretful whine came into Joanne’s voice.
“For excellent reasons. A delicate child like you exposed to, I don’t know what dangers, far from your home, your family, your doctor. No, no, put that notion out of your head at once and think no more about it.”
Joanne stood still for a moment with clenched hands and frowning brows, then she burst out with, “I think it’s horrid mean to deprive me of my only pleasures. I’ll run away; I’ll hide, but I won’t go up to that stupid place, I won’t, I won’t.”
“Joanne!” her grandfather’s voice came sternly.
“If this is what you learn from your Girl Scouts, to be impertinent and rebellious,” said her grandmother stiffly, “I think you’d better resign from the troop.”
Joanne burst into tears and rushed up to her room, angry, ashamed, distressed. Where were her high hopes, her promises? She threw herself across her bed in a fit of passionate weeping. It was too hard, too hard; it was more than she could bear to have her beautiful dreams shattered. To think that the girls would be there at the lodge without her, at the place they would never have heard of but for her! They would be riding Chico—no, they should not. He was her pony; she would give orders that no one should use him but Pablo. They would be rowing up to that dear little island in her cousin’s boat; they would be partaking of her cousin’s hospitality. They would be laughing and playing while she was miserable. She wished she might go into a decline, and then her grandparents would see what it meant to be cruel to her. She already felt a headache coming on. She hoped they would realize that it was they who made her suffer. Even her grandfather, on whose support she always counted, even he had not taken her part. She fell to sobbing again spasmodically.
Suddenly she sat up. She heard the maid coming along the hall, then a tap at the door. “Well, what is it?” asked Joanne.