"You come here," said Mary Lee. "I can't put the duck down till she gets dry."
"How ridiculous! As if a duck cared whether she was wet or dry," said Nan, going up and giving the duck a friendly poke, eliciting a remonstrative "Quack!"
"You'd care if you had fallen into a slop barrel and had to be dipped out in a bucket and lathered all over and rinsed off," said Mary Lee.
"I wouldn't be so foolish as to fall into a slop barrel in the first place. Ducks are such greedy things. I don't see how she got up there."
"She walked up a board like anybody," returned Mary Lee.
"Well, anywhere that she could swim would have done for her bath. It was silly to go through all that fuss of bathing her when she's just a duck that loves water like any other duck."
"What is your news?" asked Mary Lee, changing the subject. "I don't believe it's anything much. You always get so excited over trifles."
"I reckon you won't call this a trifle," replied Nan, "when I tell you that mother is going away for weeks and that Aunt Sarah is coming back to look after us, and that Randolph and Ashby Gordon are coming here to board all winter. I should think that was something to get excited over," she said triumphantly.
Mary Lee stared. "You're making it all up just to fool me."