“Just the thing!” exclaimed Patty, clapping her hands; “she’s the very one! she loves to live in the city and she’s lived there so much she knows all about it, and I’m sure she’d be glad to go.”
“Yes, she would be just the right one; she’s a very wise lady, and although she’s perhaps sixty years old, she is as active and energetic as many much younger women. She is quite conversant with the proprieties, and would know even better than I just what you can and can’t do. For you must know, Patty girl, that your life in New York will be more restricted in many ways than it is here. There are certain rules that must be observed, and while I want you to have a good time and a happy time, yet you must realise that you are still only a schoolgirl, and must conduct yourself as such.”
“Can’t I go to anything except school, papa?” asked Patty, looking a little dismayed.
“Well, perhaps on nice afternoons I might take you for a walk around the block,” said her father, laughing at her anxious face. “But suppose we go over and see what Grandma Elliott has to say about it.”
“All right,” said Patty, “but you must protect me from Marian’s ferocity. She’ll be as mad as a raging lion.”
When the question of the Fairfields’ permanent residence was under discussion a year earlier, Grandma Elliott was perhaps the only one in favour of their living in New York. The younger Mrs. Elliott, who was Mr. Fairfield’s sister, had most decidedly been of the opinion that a home in the small town of Vernondale was in every way better adapted to Patty’s welfare.
Patty’s cousins had vociferously agreed to this, and the result was that Mr. Fairfield had taken a house in Vernondale for a year. Patty had proved a most satisfactory little housekeeper, for she had a real talent for household management, but even Aunt Alice had at last come to agree with Mr. Fairfield that the responsibilities were rather heavy for a schoolgirl.
As Patty had anticipated, the Elliott children, and especially Marian, received the news with expressions of emphatic disapproval.
“I knew you’d do it!” wailed Marian, “but I think it’s perfectly horrid, and I’ll never forgive you as long as I live! I don’t want you to go away from Vernondale, and you won’t like it a bit in New York, I know you won’t. You can’t do anything at all; you can’t go out into the street without a chaperon, and a maid, and two policemen! And whatever will the Tea Club do without you?”
“I’ll have all the Tea Club come in to a meeting at my house,” said Patty, anxious to pacify her cousin.