There were some things which she found it hard to take pleasantly in this first experience with the companionship of a group. She hated the mischievous tricks that some of them played, but tried to be patient whenever she was the victim. She learned to look in her bed to see if either caterpillar or pebbles were there, and made it over pleasantly whenever it was “made French”. One child upset a box of blueberries upon it when it was open to air, and one morning her suit-case was missing, found later in a distant klondike, where it had been carried “for fun”.
“They think that it is really funny,” she confided to Hilary. “Several times I’ve had it upon the tip of my tongue to say as Mother has said to us ‘anybody could do that; a smart person wouldn’t even think it funny’, but I can’t do it, since I’m not bringing them up as Mother is us, and then they’d think I was mad. I must be different not to like it. And I did hate it about the sheets. Will the stain come out? Of course that was just an accident.”
“Don’t worry about that. Mother gave us common sheets and she knows that we can’t be as careful in camp life, though there is no sense in being destructive. Just get along as nicely as you can and keep pleasant. We have always had to be careful, for financial reasons, and then there is good sense in having some ‘thrift’. I don’t imagine that the parents of these girls want them to be as careless with their own and other people’s property as a few of them are.”
“I’ll try to do the best I can, but it seems so stingy not to lend things to the girls, and if I do I don’t have them when I need them. The other day when it was so wet Bess had my rubbers and I got my feet wet, and the head councillor met me and said, ‘Why, Junie, where are your rubbers?’ and I almost cried!”
“That is more serious. I don’t know what you will do except to refuse to lend them. Wrap them in a paper and keep them in your trunk if necessary.”
“Then they’ll say I’m mean.”
“Let ’em. They all have or have had the necessary things; let them look after their own. Don’t you remember how it has been said again and again, ‘Don’t lend; don’t borrow.’ And just yesterday the head councillor said, ‘It is not selfish to look after your own property.’ Those few careless girls make a lot of trouble for her, I guess. Notice all the things that are left in the office or assembly hall.”
“I really do like that generous kind that will give anything they have,” said June thoughtfully. “Bess would give away her head, I guess; but her rubbers are gone and her sweater and a lot of other things and that is why she borrows. I can’t borrow, someway, so I come to grief if I don’t have my own things.”
“A lot of the girls just leave everything to their mothers, you know. They haven’t lived in a minister’s family where things have to be managed and everybody has to take a little responsibility.”
“O, Hilary, I forgot. We have to have the doings next Friday or Saturday night. Have you any ideas? Our councillor said for each of us to think up something if we could and we are to meet after supper tonight to talk it over.”