CHAPTER XIV
POLLY IN NEW YORK
Polly’s first journey by herself caused a good deal of excitement in Lady Gay Cottage. Mrs. Dudley was a little nervous at thought of it, the Doctor wondered at the very last moment if he had been unwise to allow her to go alone, and for Polly herself the new experience almost pushed Ilga Barron and the tea-party from her mind. But the miles were traveled without any startling adventure, and in two hours she was in New York, with Cousin Floyd clasping her in his arms and telling her how glad he was to see her.
The next days were so crammed with novel sights and undreamed-of pleasures that Polly felt as if she were in a new kind of merry-go-round and must stop and take breath. But she whirled on and on, in company with her cousins and other girls and boys, and everybody was so kind and so gay that she found not a moment to be homesick or lonely in, although Fair Harbor seemed a very long way off.
From the first she and her Cousin Harold were comrades. They discovered that they had read the same books, that they enjoyed the same sports, that they loved the same flowers and songs and fairy-tale heroes. Harold had always envied boys with sisters, and now his dream of a sister for himself seemed actually to have come to pass—only he knew that the waking time must be soon.
Ever since it had been decided that Polly should come to New York she had wondered with a vague fear if her relatives would urge her to remain with them; but for a few days nothing was said of it. Then Harold spoke out.
“I wish you were really my sister,” he told her, as they stood together watching the antics of some monkeys at the Hippodrome; “then we could come here every Saturday.”
“You couldn’t come,” Polly laughed. “You’d be away at school.”
“No,” was the serious reply, “I should get father to let me go to school here. If you’d stay and be my cousin-sister, it would be just exactly as good—oh, Polly! won’t you?”