The brown eyes of her companion were questioning. “Why, I didn’t know you were going to have examination. In fact, I didn’t know anything about your school. Is there one near or do you have to go to Santa Barbara?”
Jenny told the story of her schooling from its beginning to a most interested listener. “Oh, how I do envy you.” Lenora exclaimed. “If I had had a teacher like your Miss Dearborn, I would be wiser than I am. We always lived too far away from a school for me to attend one. Dad has tutored me when he had time and so has Brother during his vacations.” Then the girl’s face brightened. “But my best teachers have been books themselves. How I have enjoyed them! Dad ordered all of the books in a graded reading course for me, and I have shelf after shelf filled with them around the walls of my room. I especially like nature poetry.”
Jenny flashed a bright smile at her companion. “Oh, I am so glad!” she cried. “Miss Dearborn is teaching me to love it. She wants me to be able to quote some poem that will describe every beautiful thing in nature that I see. Of course, I can’t always think of one, but then I store the scene away in my memory and ask Miss Dearborn what poem it would suggest to her.”
“I would love to know your teacher,” Lenora said. “I believe I could learn rapidly if I had her to teach me.”
“It’s almost the end of the school year,” Jenny commented, as she looked up and down the Coast Highway before crossing it, “and, anyway, I suppose it would hardly do for a pupil of the seminary to be taught by someone outside when they have special teachers there for all subjects.”
“No, of course not,” her companion agreed. Then, as they started down the long narrow lane leading to the farmhouse, the girl in brown exclaimed: “Oh, Jenny, do you live in that picturesque old adobe house so near the sea? I adore the ocean and I haven’t been real close to it since I came. It’s so very warm today, don’t you think we might go down to the very edge of the water and sit on the sand?”
Jenny nodded brightly: “We’ll go out on Rocky Point,” she said. “You’ll love it, I’m sure.” Then impulsively, “Oh, Lenora Gale, you don’t know what it means to me to have a girl friend who likes the same things that I like.”
“Yes, I do know,” the other girl replied sincerely, “for it means the same to me.”
Grandma Warner was delighted with Jenny’s new friend, and, as for Lenora, she was most enthusiastic about everything around the farm. She thought the old adobe house with its heavy beams simply fascinating, and when she saw Jenny’s very own room with its windows opening out toward the point of rocks and the sea, she declared that she knew, if only she could sleep in a room like that, she would not be troubled with long hours of wakefulness as she had been since her last illness. “The ocean sings a lullabye to you all of the time, doesn’t it?” she turned to say.
Jenny, who was indeed pleased with her friend’s phrase, nodded, then she laughingly confessed that sometimes, when there was a high wind or a storm, the song of the sea was a little too wild and loud to lull one to slumber. But her listener’s eyes glowed all the more. “How I would love to hear it then. I would want to stay awake to listen to the crashing of the waves.” Then she said: “I suppose you think me foolishly enthusiastic about it, but when one has lived for years and years on an inland prairie, the sea is very strange and wonderful.”