“Have you a lot more to do?” Babe had asked.
“No. If I boned hard, I think I could finish in two weeks.”
“Then why in the world don’t you bone hard?” demanded Babe bluntly. “Then you can do as you please all the rest of the summer, can’t you?”
John nodded. “After he gets me off his hands, Dwight’s going to study at the British Museum and then at some big library in Paris. He’s getting material for his doctor’s thesis. I’m going to keep with him for a while and then join the governor somewhere and go home with him in time to start in at the same old grind next fall. I don’t envy myself the trip across, either,” sighed John.
“Why not?” demanded Babe. “You ought to like traveling with your father.”
John shrugged his shoulders. “He’ll be in the very dickens of a temper by that time. You see he’s been sent over here by his doctor for a long vacation, and he’s raging around Europe in his automobile, getting madder and madder every minute, because he’s on strict orders to do nothing but loaf, and he doesn’t dare to disobey instructions.”
“He’ll like it when he gets started,” suggested Babe, soothingly.
“Never,” laughed John. “You don’t know my father. The very mention of a vacation affects him just the way Miss Wales’s red cap did that old Scotch cow. You ought to see the letters he writes me. They get fiercer and fiercer each time.”
“Well, if he’s that kind it will please him to know that you’re working hard. So I advise you all the more to pitch in and hustle through,” Babe had finished, forcibly if not elegantly. “Give yourself two weeks—or three, to be perfectly safe—and then dare yourself to finish.”
“If I did that, I’d probably want to go sailing all the time, or I’d dawdle over an exciting novel and forget all about my limit.”