Her younger sister was engaged in drawing on her stockings.
“Come on, Andrée!” she said. “We’ll be late for lunch and Mother does hate that so.... No: I suppose this would be a treat for poor Father, after being shut up in a hot office all the time.”
“I’d like to see him stand it for one week!” said Andrée, grimly. “Just for one week, that’s all!”
“And then, of course, it’s cheap,” said the sensible Edna. “I suppose he has to think of that, poor thing, with Bertie going to college and you and your awful Mr. MacGregor. We must be a tremendous expense.”
“I don’t want to be!” cried Andrée. “And I wouldn’t be, either, if he wasn’t so darned obstinate. I’ve told him and told him that I could easily earn enough to pay for my lessons by teaching. Mr. MacGregor says I’m thoroughly qualified, and that he’d help me to get pupils. But no! Father pretends to be so advanced, and says he wants us to be able to earn our own livings, and then when we can, he stops it. He and Mother are both hoping and praying I’ll get married before I have a chance to do anything. But I won’t! I’m going to—”
“Oh, Andrée! For pity’s sake! Not that! Do get your shoes and stockings on! It’s after twelve!”
They were sitting on the bank of a wide, shallow stream running its hasty course down the mountain side; a favourite spot with them. They liked to come there in the morning and with bare feet and skirts pinned up, to pick their way over the stones, with the cold water lapping about their ankles. It was like a broad and deserted highway, lined with trees. On either side were the dark woods, of which they were both a little afraid. They would ascend the stream, “stepping stones,” past the sombre belt of woodland to the wide meadows basking in the sun, and then suddenly the banks grew high and rocky, the stream went out of the sunlight and entered a ravine, gloomy and mysterious, and was no longer a stream but a deep and ice-cold pool, fed by a trickling waterfall. Farther than this they had never gone, the climb up the rocks beside the waterfall would have been a very difficult one, and moreover it was a spot where they didn’t care to linger. City born and bred, they had a sort of horror of this silent, imprisoned place.
The stream—the “crick,” the country people called it, had an unfailing charm for them. They came to it every fine morning and indulged in pursuits which they were a little ashamed of and which they justified by their ennui—an ennui more pretended than real. They talked to each other and to their mother a great deal about the horrible dulness of the little Catskill Mountains summer resort, but they were really very happy in it, and they secretly enjoyed their infantile amusements. They whittled little boats of soft wood and sailed them; they brought tin pails and scooped up the lazy, fat pollywogs that lay along the edges of the shallow pools in long rows, nasty creatures with a sort of horrible fascination about them. Andrée would watch them wriggling sluggishly in the pail for a long time, with the sun shining through their translucent, speckled tails, and sniff the queer primeval smell of them.
“Aren’t they horrible!” she would cry.
“Don’t look at them, idiot!” her sister would say. “You’ll be having nightmares about them again to-night.”