“Just because we’re over here, so far away from home, is no reason for our forgetting or neglecting the least 117 little bit the rules of our camp-fire. In fact, I don’t think we deserve any credit for being good where Mrs. Wescott is; you simply can’t help yourself when our guardian is around.”
“That’s true enough,” agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in camp—eating, swimming, walking, canoeing—subject always to the slightest word or wish of their lovely, smiling, cheery guardian, who always knew just what to do and just the time to do it.
“That’s all right for me,” began Jessie, heroically. “I’ve been eating candies and drinking sodas and reading so much that my eyes are nearly out of my head, but I don’t know what under the light of the sun you two have done.”
“Well, in the first place, I’ve become horribly rude,” confessed Lucile.
“We haven’t noticed it,” said Jessie.
“Well, I have,” she went on. “This morning an old lady dropped her handkerchief under my very eyes and I was in such a hurry to get to you that I didn’t stop to pick it up. And all my clothes need mending. That good waist is all ripped where you yanked the button off, Evelyn——”
“Oh, I did not,” began Evelyn, hotly.
“All right. I don’t care who did it; the fact remains that it is torn and I haven’t mended it, and I haven’t written half as much as I ought to, and—well, if I told you everything, I wouldn’t get through to-day.”
“And I use slang from morning to night, and I chewed a piece of gum that Phil gave me right out in the street, too,” began Evelyn, miserably.
“Oh, Phil!” said Jessie, disdainfully. “He would ruin anybody’s manners.” 118