"Let's go and watch them put the things into the boxes," Elizabeth said. "It's the most exciting thing to see the letters go in. Ours is 178. See, here it is," she cried, as Peggy followed her into the stuffy office. "There's a card from Buddy already, and one for Grandfather from the Bass River Savings Bank, and one fat one that I can't see the face of that I hope is from Jean. She doesn't always wait to get answers, you know. She writes when the spirit moves and so do I. I've just been writing her."
"When you go back to New York, let's write to each—I mean one another—like that, only I'm afraid you'll get the worst of the bargain. When the spirit moves me to write a letter, it mostly only moves me to say, 'Dear Elspeth,' or whoever it is, 'Hello! Yours frantically fondly, Peggy.' It's funny, when I like to talk so much, that I don't like to write more."
"There's my thirty-first," Elizabeth whispered, as a solemn black chauffeur made his appearance in the post office.
"My thirty-third," Peggy said, "and outside is a white horse. What a pity we have got to get the white horses in sequence. They are so hard to find, especially when you are looking for them. But when we do get them all, I am going to keep my hands behind me all the time, until I find somebody I am willing to shake hands with!"
"It would be awful, after all this trouble, if we didn't shake hands with the right one, wouldn't it, Peggy? There goes a postcard right into my box. It's for Judidy. She has a young man. Did you know it? He's almost as fat as she is, and not nearly so good looking."
"I hope she gets somebody very nice, and marries them, and has a whole backyard full of fat pink babies, though I don't know what Grandmummy would do."
"Grandfather says she'd get the work done quicker if she didn't have Judidy to look out for, and I think perhaps she would. Isn't it funny, when I first came, Judidy just seemed to me like a kind of queer person that I felt not quite right about eating at the table with, and now she's my friend."
The gate in the wicket flew up, and in an instant it was surrounded.
"See all the mail-hungry fiends," Peggy said. "Oh, goody, Mother's got a letter from my cousin in Rome—and Ruth has a letter from that Chambers fellow."
"What Chambers fellow?" Elizabeth asked, quickly.