"Well, I'm going down town to the store tomorrow and buy some pretty gingham for cutting out into school dresses which you're to stitch up on the machine, if you'll try to run the seams straight. Then, as soon as they're made, we'll get some school-books, and a little girl about your size will put on one of the new dresses, take the new books in her new book-bag, and go right straight to school--where she'll be a credit to us all, I'm sure."
"I'll learn to read so good that I'll be able to read all the books in the whole round world!" sighed the Babe, happy in the promised fulfillment of her highest earthly desire.
By the time the new studio was finished Elizabeth had quite a display of photographs, having 'taken' the family and all the neighbors who were handy, finding Maudie Pratt a willing and excellent subject, while Ruth in her own show-window set forth a tempting array of tarts and pies and doughnuts, in token that the bakery was in operation.
Mrs. Pell, the wife of Roy's employer, was their first customer, bringing her twin boys of seven to be photographed.
"Their pa says if anybody can make 'em stand still long enough to get a picture, they'll sure deserve a prize," declared the twins' mother frankly, as she arranged Wilfred's big, smothering collar, and tied anew the huge red bow under Wilmot's chin. "I taken 'em to the finest picture-taker in Houston, last summer, and the best he could do was a proof that had three heads apiece on it!"
"I think I can manage them, Mrs. Pell," said Elizabeth, confidently, seeing more orders ahead if she could succeed where the city photographer had failed. "They are such cute little fellows. Now, boys, if you'll be real quiet I'll give you a doughnut apiece, in just one minute," she promised the squirming twins, who brightened amazingly, keeping expectant eyes upon the doughnuts which Elizabeth had placed at just the proper elevation.
They were muffled and choked in stiff white pique suits, not a bit comfortable, and their mother insisted that they should be posed in a very stiff position, with their arms about each other. However, in the end Elizabeth secured a very good negative, "at least it has only one head apiece," she laughed. "But send them over when they have on their everyday clothes, and let me take a picture for my window, if you don't mind."
Mrs. Pell didn't mind--indeed she was highly gratified, and she sent Wilfred and Wilmot over promptly, as soon as they had changed to their old collarless and tieless play overalls. Then, while the Babe told them a fairy story to excite the proper amount of interest in their faces, and Elizabeth bade them eat doughnuts at will, to promote happiness that "showed through," she snapped her camera on a most excellent likeness--so good, in fact, that their proud father ordered a bromide enlargement to be made, and advised all his customers to go by the studio and see that cute picture in the window--the cutest thing in the shape of a photograph he'd ever seen took.
Trade increased, and both girls soon had all they could do--indeed Mrs. Spooner, in her heart, often sighed to think of the free young souls doomed to have so much work and so little play in their busy lives.
It was plain from the first that the Spooner girls and Roy Lambert could maintain the family, though it took every bit of strength and every ounce of energy the three young people could bring to bear on it. Mrs. Spooner drew a breath of relief when one day she saw her brother Harvey turn in at the gate and calmly walk across to the studio as though he were an ordinary customer, coming on an ordinary errand.