“It’s really a nawful state of affairs,” Tess declared, nodding her sunny head, gravely, and with her lips pursed up. “They are growing right up without knowing their own names. Why! I don’t see how their own mother knows them apart.”
“Oh!” gasped Dot, to whom this was a new idea indeed. “I never thought of that.”
“Well, it’s so,” said Tess. “I—I wish Ruth had sent for them and had had them brought down here when Rosa and Tom Jonah came.”
“But they couldn’t leave their mother, Tess,” objected Dot. “They’re too small.”
“I—don’t—know,” said Tess, doubtfully. “At any rate, it’s high time they were named. You know, Mrs. MacCall says so herself.”
Dot picked up the letter that the kind housekeeper at the old Corner House had written especially to the two smaller Kenway girls.
“She says they chase their tails all day long and they have had to put them out in the woodshed to keep them from being under foot,” Dot said, reading slowly, for Mrs. MacCall’s writing was not like print.
“They must be named,” repeated Tess, with conviction.
“But Ruth won’t let us go home to do it,” quoth Dot.
“And I don’t want to. Do you?” demanded Tess, hastily. “I don’t want to leave the beach now, just when we’re having so much fun.”