“And so she is,” agreed Agnes.
“Well,” said Dot, who had listened in grave silence, “if we are going off on a long journey with our car, my Alice-doll must have her complexion ‘tended to. You take her, Neale, and get her doctored,” and she thrust the precious doll directly into the boy’s hands, and marched out of the room with quivering lip. It was really very hard for the smallest Corner House girl to part from her most loved child even in such an emergency.
“There now! What did I tell you?” demanded Agnes, of Neale. “You’ve got your hands full.”
“Of doll,” he admitted, but he did not appear rueful. “I know just where they will fix her up as good as new,” and he laughed. “I believe in preparedness. I foresaw this when I spoke about the doll the other day.”
But now was the time to talk about the tour. Agnes had prepared for this since the very first day she knew they were to have the automobile. The height of her ambition was to travel in the most modern way—by motor car.
With Neale—and sometimes aided by her sisters—she had planned elaborate routes through the surrounding country—sometimes into neighboring states. She had borrowed maps and guide books galore and had purchased not a few. In fact, in a desultory way, she and Neale had picked up a smattering of knowledge of roads and towns and hotels and general geographical information which really might be of use if, as Ruth said they would, the Corner House girls should go on a tour in the new seven-passenger car.
They talked about it to the exclusion of almost everything else that evening, and Agnes spread the news abroad at school the next day. That the Corner House girls really owned a car was already an important fact to their school friends.
For Ruth and Agnes were not likely to be selfish in their enjoyment of their new possession. Stinginess was not a fault in the Kenway family.
On the very second Saturday after they had come into possession of the car Neale had taken out the older girls and a party of their friends in the morning, and in the afternoon Tess and Dot had played hostesses to a lot of little girls. As Mr. Howbridge remarked with a laugh, the cost of the new car was a mere drop in the bucket. Maintenance and gasoline were the items that would deplete the pocketbooks of his wards.
As for Neale O’Neil, he almost lived in the car.