But Mrs. Conway asked to be spared even that small diversion.
“I only wish we could go over in a train,” she said ruefully, for she had an unconquerable horror of the sea, though the small ones never knew it.
Then she started up to go back to the letters and other work that pressed so heavily.
“It is nearly nine,” she said, “all of you run to bed at once. But I suppose you would never go to sleep without a little more talk. Phyl, if I leave you my watch, will you make Weenie wrap up and get into my bed at ten, and go to sleep yourselves—faithfully now?”
Phyl promised to send Weenie off.
“And I’ll shut my eyes hard,” she said, “but I shall never go to sleep again, shall you, Dolly?”
“Never,” said Dolly with a deep breath.
[102]
]Once in bed they reviewed the situation from every possible—and impossible—standpoint. They had to picture the ship and the idea of themselves, not the personages of romance they so often were, but their ordinary every-day selves, sailing and sailing away over blue waters to a land where the sun shone always. They had to consider what dolls, books, and clothes they would take; they had to wonder what cousin this and Alice and Nellie that would think. They had to giggle quietly at the idea of going to sleep in bunk beds, one on top of the other, and to shudder pleasurably at the thought of storms, and whales, and ships on fire, water-spouts, and similar dangers that they doubted not lay in wait for those who went down to the sea in ships.
They had to piece together their meagre information of that far-away country of the sun, and make a tangible place of it. But so difficult this proved, Dolly slipped on her blue felt slippers and bright red dressing-gown and stole down the landing to the small book-room, where were stored the atlases and the Book of Travels in Foreign Countries.
The only atlas she could find, however, in the hurry was an American one her father had often laughed at, and had wondered in what way he had come possessed of it. It began with a very large and complete map of N. America; then followed one of S. America, then there came a succession of twenty or thirty pages of the various States, [103] ]even some of the smallest, least important ones, with all the most insignificant towns and villages carefully marked.