“I’d give all four of my letters from Laddie,” said Mabel, wistfully, “for just a postal card with one little word on it from my mother.”
“Well,” declared Gladys de Milligan, who also was watching the mail bag, expectantly, “if I had a daughter as clumsy as you are I’d chuck her into a boarding school and leave her there forever. I’d be glad to forget about her.”
“Anyhow,” declared Mabel, crossly, “you don’t need to chew gum in my ear, even if you would be that kind of a mother.”
The Lakeville girls tried to cheer troubled Mabel but she could see that they, too, were becoming anxious. Indeed, Bettie had secretly written to Mr. Black about it. Mr. Black, Bettie firmly believed, could fix anything.
“My goodness!” said Cora, one evening, when the girls were waiting for Henrietta to come and tell them ghost stories on the spooky front stairs, “here are the Christmas holidays coming right along and I don’t know what I’m ever going to do. I’ve written and written to my people about the way I’m growing—told ’em I was seven feet tall if I was an inch—and they won’t believe me. They think I’m exaggerating! Here I am, growing a mile a minute; but my clothes, alas! are standing still. I’m going home with Maude, to visit her perfectly scrumptious family, and I haven’t one single dud that’s big enough either lengthwise or sidewise.”
“Didn’t the photographs work?” asked Helen Miller. For the Miller girls, at Cora’s request, had taken a number of snapshots of the growing girl to be sent to her doubting parents. Perhaps Cora had grown a little at the very moment in which she was snapped. At any rate the pictures were slightly hazy as to outline; yet, to the girls, they looked convincingly like Cora.
“No,” returned Cora, mournfully. “They didn’t believe that it was a picture of me.”
“What are you going to try next?” asked little Jane Pool.
“Nothing. I’ve given up. I’ve half a mind to stay right here for the holidays.”
“Nonsense!” said Maude. “You can wear my clothes—I’ve several things that are too big for me—that new navy blue taffeta, for instance.”