“But if your father gets more money, more salary, you know, maybe you’ll have a grand house, like the Forbeses.”
“I don’t want a grand house. If it’s in Buffalo at all, I’d just as lieve have the ratty attic as anything else!” and Dolly renewed her weeping. She rocked her plump body back and forth in paroxysms of woe, and wailed out new horrors as they came to her distorted imagination.
“I know the sort of girls they’ll have there. All wearing shirtwaists and old ribbon bands round their foreheads! Oh, I know!”
“How do you know?” and Dotty’s admiration rose at these strange revelations.
“Oh, I sort of see them, the horrid bunch! I hate to see girls of our age in shirtwaists, and I know they’ll all have them. And the boys will be horrid, too. Not nice, like our brothers and Tad and Tod, but all sort of outgrown!”
“My! Buffalo must be an awful place!”
“It isn’t only Buffalo, it’s any place in the United States, except Berwick. Don’t you see it, Dotty? Don’t you know it must be so? And if not just as I’ve described, it’s something equally worse!”
“Yes, I s’pose so,” returned Dotty, awed by this instinctive knowledge of Dolly’s.
“But I’ve got to go, all the same. So I’ve got to make up my mind to it.”
“You shan’t go, and you shan’t make up your mind to it! I won’t have it. Say, Doll, how about this? If you do go,—you visit me six months every year, and I’ll visit you six months.”