That first day in camp the girls had no visitors. Through their binoculars and opera glasses, they could see the boys very active about their camp across the lake. It was plain they were too busy to visit Acorn Island.
The girls of Central High, however, had plenty of fun without the boys. Only Bobby declared that Lil principally spent the time staring through her opera glasses across the lake, wishing Purt would come over in the Duchess; but Lil angrily denied that. 108
“And you stop trying to stir up a rumpus, Miss,” commanded Laura, to the cut-up. “Let us live, if we can, like a Happy Family.”
“My!” drawled Jess, “Mother Wit is nothing if not optimistic.”
“Ha! what is your idea of an optimist?” demanded Nellie Agnew.
“Why,” Jess said, smiling quietly, “I read of a real optimist once. He was strolling along a country road and an automobile came along and hit him in the back. It knocked him twenty feet.
“‘Oh, well!’ said he, as he got up, ‘I was going in this direction, anyway.’”
“Aw, say!” put in Bobby, “that’s all right for a story; but my idea of a real optimist is a man who’s dead broke, going into a restaurant and ordering oysters on the half shell with the hope that he can pay for the dinner by finding a pearl in one of the bivalves.”
They all laughed at that, and then Laura said:
“To get back to our original conversation, let us see if we can’t get on in this camp without friction. And that means that you, Bobby, must set a watch on your tongue.”