Aunt Sarah Maltby shook her head, as Tess pulled out a chair for her.
“I’m getting too old, my dear, to go traipsing off over the country in one of those flying machines.”
“It’s a houseboat—not a flying machine,” Agnes explained.
“Well, it’s about the same, I reckon,” returned the old lady. “No, I’ll stay at home and look after things at the Corner House. It’ll need somebody.”
“Yes, there’s no doubt of that,” Ruth said.
So it was arranged. Aunt Sarah Maltby would stay at home with Linda and Uncle Rufus, while Mrs. MacCall accompanied the Corner House girls on the houseboat.
There was much to be done before the trip could be undertaken, and many business details to arrange, for, as inheritors of the Stower estate, Ruth and her sisters received rents from a number of tenants, some of them in not very good circumstances.
“And we must see that they will want nothing while we are gone,” Ruth had said.
It was part of her self-imposed duties to play Lady Bountiful to some of the poorer persons who rented Uncle Peter Stower’s tenements.
“Well, as long as you don’t go to buying ‘dangly jet eawin’s’ for Olga Pederman it will be all right,” said Agnes, and they laughed at this remembrance of the girl who, when ill with diphtheria, had asked for these ornaments when Ruth called to see what she most wanted.