“Jean, you little imp of mischief!”
“Well, I wanted to make you hear me,” answered that young lady complacently. “Constance had spoken to you twice but you’d gone to France and couldn’t hear her, so I thought maybe the megaphone would reach across the Atlantic Ocean, and it did. Now can I go out?”
“Can you or may you? which do you mean,” asked the eldest sister somewhat sententiously.
Constance laughed softly in her corner.
“O, fiddlesticks on your old English! I get enough of it five days in a week without having to take a dose of it Saturday afternoon too. I know well enough that I can go out, but whether you’ll say yes is another question, and I want to,” and Jean puckered up her small pug-nose at her sister.
“What a spunky little body it is,” said the latter, laughing in spite of herself, for Jean, the ten-year-old baby of the family was already proving that she was likely to be a very lively offspring of the Carruth stock.
“And where are you minded to stroll on this charming afternoon when everybody else is glad to sit in a snug room and take a Saturday rest?”
“Mother isn’t taking hers,” was the prompt retort. “She’s down helping pack the boxes that are to go to that girls’ college out in Iowa. She went in all the rain right after luncheon, and I guess if she can go out while it poured ‘cats and dogs,’ I can when—when—when—well it doesn’t even pour cats. It’s almost stopped raining.”
“Where do you get hold of those awful expressions, Jean? Whoever heard of ‘cats and dogs’ pouring down? What am I to do with you? I declare I feel responsible for your development and—”
“Then let me go out. I need some fresh air to develop in: my lungs don’t pump worth a cent in this stuffy place. It’s hot enough to roast a pig with those logs blazing in the fire-place. I don’t see how you stand it.”