Portia threw the book down.
"What valuables; my tooth braces?" she demanded sarcastically. "Lucy, I wish we'd never read it. Now we have nothing to look forward to but being bored!"
"Oh, pooh, I don't believe a word of it. I don't really believe she had any secret power. Neither do you. I think she was just writing about some dead old boring August in eighteen-eighty-whatever-it-was."
"Do you really?"
"I really do. But I still think she was very good about character," Lucy said....
The girls were sitting on the window seat in Portia's room with the door closed. It was a dull, gray day, and Foster and Davey had thunderously invaded the house, bringing with them a fresh supply of boys their own age. They seemed to be doing an extraordinary amount of shouting and pounding up and downstairs.
"Boys just have to be noisy," Lucy observed critically. "They just naturally have to be noisy, the way a chicken has to have feathers. I don't know why."
"Daddy always says what Mark Twain said about them—you know, the Tom Sawyer man—he said that what a small boy is, is a 'loud noise with dirt on it'.... Listen to Gulliver, too, but of course he can't help it; he's a boy himself."
"They should take lessons from Mousenick," Lucy said, stroking the tiny cat, asleep beside her. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could keep him a kitten forever?"
"I wish we could." Portia stood up, stretching and yawning. "And I wish there was something to do."