“Would you like to buy some extra fine ones?” continued Gladys.
“Why, yes, I suppose so,” said Mrs. Davis, “who has any for sale?”
“I have,” said Gladys, “right out here in the machine.” Mrs. Davis bought the whole eight quarts of large berries, paying fifteen cents a quart straight, and ordered another eight quarts as soon as they should be ripe. She also took two bunches of asparagus.
“Whatever are you doing, Gladys Evans?” she asked, curiously. “Peddling berries?”
Gladys laughed at her evident mystification, and tingled with a desire to keep her guessing. “We decided that I had better work this summer,” she said, gravely, “so I am peddling berries for a friend of ours who is a farmer. We will have to go on a farm ourselves, father said, if things to eat get much dearer, so I am getting the practice. Wouldn’t you like to be a regular customer, and have me bring you fresh vegetables and fruit three times a week all through the summer?”
“Why, yes,” stammered Mrs. Davis in a daze, “of course, certainly.”
“All right, then,” said Gladys, “I’ll put you down.” She drove off in high glee, and Mrs. Davis went into the house with a knowing smile on her face. So the Evanses were losing money after all, and Gladys was working this summer instead of traveling. Poor Gladys! She flew up-stairs to communicate the news to her energetic daughter Caroline who was just beginning to think about getting up. “I do feel so sorry for poor Gladys,” she said. “You must be very kind to her whenever you meet her.”
The rest of the berries and vegetables were disposed of to other friends of Gladys’s and Migwan’s, all for topnotch prices, and there were at least half a dozen names in the little note book when they started homeward, of people who wanted to be supplied regularly. To some of her friends Gladys told frankly whose fruit she was selling, and enlisted their sympathies in the enterprise, while to others, like the Davises and the Joneses, who were thorough snobs, she could not resist pretending that she was actually working for a farmer to earn money. She could not remember when she had enjoyed anything so much as the expressions on the various faces when she made her little speech at the door and offered her basket of fruit for inspection. “Wait until I tell dad about it,” she chuckled to Migwan.
When they returned to Onoway House they found that during their absence the girls, with the help of Mr. Landsdowne, had constructed a raft about seven feet square, which they were setting afloat on the river. “Oh, what fun!” cried Migwan when she saw it. “We needed another rapid vessel to go boating in. There’s only one rowboat and we could never all go out at once. What shall we call it?”
“Let’s name it the Tortoise,” said Hinpoha, “and call the rowboat the Hare.”