“Horrid little smarty-cat!” was Rosie’s comment and she scowled until her face looked like a thunder-cloud.
“I shall never speak to her again,” Maida declared fervently. “But what shall I do about it, Rosie?—it may be true what she said.”
“Now don’t you get discouraged, Maida,” Rosie said. “Because I can tell you just how to get or make those things Laura spoke of.”
“Oh, can you, Rosie. What would I do without you? I’ll put everything down in a book so that I shan’t forget them.”
She limped over to the desk. There the black head bent over the golden one.
“What is dulse?” Maida demanded first.
“Don’t you know what dulse is?” Rosie asked incredulously. “Maida, you are the queerest child. The commonest things you don’t know anything about. And yet I suppose if I asked you if you’d seen a flying-machine, you’d say you had.”
“I have,” Maida answered instantly, “in Paris.”
Rosie’s face wrinkled into its most perplexed look. She changed the subject at once. “Well, dulse is a purple stuff—when you see a lot of it together, it looks as if a million toy-balloons had burst. It’s all wrinkled up and tastes salty.”
Maida thought hard for a moment. Then she burst into laughter, although the big round tear-drops were still hanging from the tips of her lashes. “There was a whole drawerful here when I first came. I remember now I thought it was waste stuff and threw it all away.”