“Not at all! I never let a trip tire me. My father used to say that it was nonsense for persons to get tired on a trip. ‘Just let the engine do the work and sit back and read and think and mix with your fellow passengers and you won’t get tired. The persons who let a journey make them tired are usually the ones who feel somehow that they must help pull the cars.’”
Elizabeth laughed. Already she was liking this funny little friend of Mary Louise. What an amusing looking person she was! Her features were not plain, although certainly not beautiful. Her hair was decidedly red, her face freckled but with a healthy color which kept the freckles from being too apparent. Her eyes were her best points, although at times she could make those eyes as stolid and dim as a half-wit’s. Her teeth were excellent, but as she usually laughed with her eyes one seldom saw her teeth. Elizabeth thought her face was interesting.
Josie O’Gorman was older than Mary Louise and her other friends, but there was something very youthful about her little figure and as she always dressed in misses’ sizes and cuts she could easily have passed for seventeen, although she was at least twenty-two. She said she bought juvenile clothes because they fitted her small figure and because they were especially designed for boarding school girls who were late for breakfast and had no time to fool with hooks and eyes. Her favorite style of dress was a one-piece affair that slipped over her head like a middy blouse. It hung in straight pleats from yoke to hem, confined loosely at the waist by a low hanging leather belt. Her headgear was always a straight brimmed sailor and her shoes of a broad-toed, low-heeled, sensible style. In the winter she wore blue serge in the morning, white serge in the evening and heavy white rajah silk for dress-up. In the summer, it was blue linen in the morning, white linen in the evening and linen lawn or crepe de chine for dress-up. Josie always looked fresh and well dressed, if not in the latest fashion, and she had to take no thought whatsoever concerning her apparel, not even as much as a man, since she had no collar button with which to contend and no stiff collars to be frayed out by heartless laundries. She could carry everything she possessed in a small wardrobe trunk with its convenient compartments for different garments. She always kept her clothes in her trunk whether she was at home or on a visit and a neat handbag ready packed with a change of linen and toilet articles in case of a sudden journey being sprung upon her. That was the result of her father’s training.
Detective O’Gorman used to say: “If we are to track criminals we must be as ready as criminals and I am sure no thief or murderer worthy of the name would have to stop and pack a grip to go on an enforced trip whether he knew he was hounded or not.”
Josie desired above all things to be as much like her father as a young girl could be like a middle-aged man and she was bidding fair to succeed.
She constantly quoted her father, who had been full of wise saws. Sometimes Josie gave him credit for sayings that were well known to have belonged either to Solomon or Good Richard, but the devoted daughter was sure they had originated with Detective O’Gorman and those other two less brilliant gentlemen had plagiarized his wisdom.
“Now tell us, Josie, what are your plans for a shop?” suggested Mary Louise after Elizabeth and Josie had finished sizing each other up. “I have told Josie what you are contemplating, Elizabeth.”
“My idea is a kind of higgledy-piggledy place, a place where one can get anything under heaven that is needed, because, if we happen not to be carrying it in stock, we will take orders for it if there is time to wait for an order or we will go out and shop for it if the thing can be bought in Dorfield. We will bargain to furnish anything from strawberries in January to information concerning the identity of the doorkeeper in Congress who dropped dead when news came of Cornwallis’ surrender. I know of a shop called ‘The Serendipity Shop.’ That, I believe, is the name Leigh Hunt gave to a place where one could go in and find out anything. But that has too erudite and obscure a meaning for us, who mean to be quite plain and simple. I think Higgledy-Piggledy Shop would be a grand name for us. Don’t you?”
“Splendid!” was the verdict of both her listeners.
“I have perhaps the most complete collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries outside of the Congressional Library. Father was daffy about exact information and had systematically collected all books that professed to contain such information from ‘Inquire Within, 3,700 Facts for the People,’ to the latest and most down-to-date dictionary of war slang. These books will be invaluable.”