Virginia looked up at a tall, slim figure, taller than Jim, with merry brown eyes and slightly stooping shoulders. The boys laughed at her mystified look. “Shorty!” she gasped.
“Because he isn’t short, Virgie,” said Isabel. “Boys are that way.”
“Then you are Will, and ‘Slim,’” said Virginia, looking at Will’s sturdy proportions.
“Exactly,” said he. “Milton is so studious that he is getting a trifle round-shouldered, but when he gets his growth we think that he will be all right.”
“Milton’s getting his growth is another of our brilliant jokes,” explained Isabel. “He is over six feet now. Oh, here’s Father,” as a quiet, pleasant looking man came in with Jim, and embraced his daughter. “We’ll find Auntie upstairs, I suppose, seeing that the rooms are warm enough, and taking the bags to the right place herself, instead of letting Jim know where to put them.”
It was not long before the family had said good-night and the girls were tucked away in Isabel’s room, big and airy in summer-time, but warm now from a furnace fire. Good, substantial walnut furniture, homemade book shelves, and clean window curtains were in evidence. “Do you like a big pillow?” asked Isabel.
“No, I’ll just sleep on the little one,” answered Virginia. Isabel took two large square pillows from the bed and dumped them on a chair.
“Auntie insists on having these, for fear somebody might want them. The two little pillows, you see, take the place of a bolster. She has a bolster and even bigger pillows than these in her room. I don’t know whether she sleeps on them or not. Isn’t it funny the way different people do?”
“I bought a baby pillow, you remember, to take to camp last summer.”
“It makes you straight to sleep without any pillow.”