"That's too much for me," laughed Mrs. Fairchild. "But suppose you had a million—or enough so you'd always have plenty for whatever you happened to feel like doing. Would you travel?"
"Yes," said Jeanne, "to St. Louis, to get those children. Sometimes I make up a sort of a story about that when I can't go to sleep. I find a great big chest full of money on the Cinder Pond beach, and then I spend it."
"How?"
"Well, first I go after those children. And then I buy the Cinder Pond and build a lovely big home-y house like this on the green hillside back of it—across the road, you know, from where we go down to the dock. And of course I always buy the dock and the pond for sort of an extra front yard. Then, I have a comfortable big automobile with a very good-natured chauffeur to take the children to and from school and a rented mother—"
"A what?"
"A nice, mother-y person to keep house and tell the cook—a very good one like Bridget—what to give us for meals. I always have a nice supper ready for Old Captain, ready on his table to surprise him when he comes home at night. That is, in summer. In winter, he lives with us. Of course I'm having the children educated so they can earn their own living when they grow up, because I might want to be married some day—I've decided to wait, though, until I'm about twenty-seven, because it's so much fun to be just a girl. I'll have Sammy learn to be a discoverer, I think, because he's so inquisitive; and maybe Annie can sing in a choir—she has a sweet little voice. And Patsy loves grasshoppers—I don't know just what he can do."
"Perhaps he'll make a good naturalist, a professor of zoölogy," laughed Mrs. Fairchild, "but you've left me out."
"Oh, no, I haven't. You're my fairy godmother and my very best friend. You always help me buy clothes for the children and pick out wallpapers and rugs and things. You always have lovely times in my house."
"I'd certainly have the time of my life," agreed Mrs. Fairchild, "if your dream-house were real."
"Well," sighed Jeanne, "it isn't—in the daytime. I've only two dollars left in my pincushion. I guess that wouldn't raise a very large family. And there isn't any way for a chest of gold to be washed up on the Cinder Pond beach, because no ship could get inside the pond, unless it climbed right over the dock. And of course, without that chest, the rest of the dream wouldn't work. I've tried to move the chest to the other beach; but some way, it doesn't fit that one—other people might see it there and find it first."