But her eyes had a faraway expression in spite of their slightly worried look, and the remark Peggy made was, “Oh, Katherine, Katherine, I wish I were going to Hampton.”
Katherine started to speak, but could not, and turned her head hastily away because the thought of four years without Peggy, even four years among hundreds of attractive girls like Ditto Armandale, seemed to her at the minute but a bleak expanse unlit by a single gleam of comfort.
“Peggy, won’t you write to your aunt and tell her you must come?” she begged suddenly. “Don’t you think she’d let you if she knew that Florence and I and most of the girls are going?”
Peggy rubbed her moist forehead thoughtfully. “Don’t think so,” she said, “but I might write and—hint that I want to go.”
Their momentary depression passed, though, when they sat down to eat the good things they had brought in their boxes. Peggy kept in the sun as much as possible, hoping to dry off before it was time to go home. This phase came to her more poignantly later, however, when the other girls had put on their shoes and stockings again and were making ready to go home.
“But mine are all wet and they won’t go on,” mourned Peggy, “and my dress is a disgrace and my hair isn’t very dry yet either, and when I put my hat on little rivulets run down my face like so many horrid young Niagaras. Oh, there that shoe is on, but I can’t say there’s any special advantage in it. Just hear the water sloshing about when I walk! It’s a wonder I won’t take cold out of this, but I won’t—I never do when I’ve had a good time. Girls, keep close to me because I’m the most awful object that ever got on a street car and I’d much rather walk only I wouldn’t get home for two or three days, I guess, and these wet shoes would have dissolved like paper long before that.”
They climbed the fences with less agility than they had displayed in getting over them in the first place, and they were a tired lot of girls when they reached the car track and threw themselves on the grass beside it.
“I hear a singing on the rails,” sighed Peggy, “but I’m too stiff to get up. Somebody wave to the car. Mercy, here it is already coming around the corner. There, keep close to me, somebody on each side,—oh, what will the people on there think of Andrews?”
When they clambered into the car and the whole bedraggled crowd of recent water-sprites sank into their seats, a motherly woman from across the aisle looked up and stared at them in a kind of fascinated horror. Her appraising glance missed nothing from their mud bordered skirts and soppy shoes to their flying, tangled hair.
She turned in some disgust to a woman who sat beside her. “Isn’t it terrible how hoydenish some girls are?” she asked audibly. “Now those poor little spectacles across the aisle—somebody ought to keep watch of them. I wish you might have seen the lovely group of girls that rode on my car a few hours ago when I was coming out this way. Quite different from this messy little party. They were all in white, as sweet as dolls and so adorably radiant and clean and spiritual looking. They made me think of angels. Dear, dear, I shall never forget the picture they made! You would not know that those little tomboys opposite belonged to the same species even!”