"No, don't put it that way," Julietta Hyde objected. "Just say she wants us to take the parts of fourteen Lady Sherlock Holmeses in a Juvenile drama in real life."
"Very cleverly expressed," Miss Ladd remarked admiringly. "Detective is entirely too coarse a term to apply to any of my Camp Fire Girls and I won't stand for it."
"We might call ourselves special agents, operatives, secret emissaries, or mystery probers," Harriet Newcomb suggested.
"Yes, we could expect something like that from our walking dictionary," said Ernestine Johanson. "But whatever we call ourselves, I am ready to vote aye. Come on with your-or Mrs. Hutchins and her lawyers'-plan, Katherine. I'm impatient to hear the rest of it."
Katherine produced an envelope from her middy-blouse pocket and drew from it a folded paper, which she unfolded and spread out before her.
CHAPTER IV
THE GIRLS VOTE "AYE".
"Before I take up the plan outlined by Mrs. Hutchins and her lawyer," Katherine continued, as she unfolded the paper, "I want to explain one circumstance that might be confusing if left unexplained. As I said, the uncle and aunt who have Glen in charge live in Baltimore. They do not own any real estate, but rent a rather expensive apartment, which they never could support on the family income aside from the monthly payments received from Mrs. Hutchins as trustee of Glen's estate. This family's name is Graham, and its head, James Graham, is a bookkeeper receiving a salary of about $1,800 a year. In these war times, when the cost of living is so high, that is a very moderate salary on which to support a family of six: father, mother, two girls and two boys, including Glen.
"But this family, according to reports that have reached Mrs. Hutchins, is living in clover. Mr. Graham, who is a hard working man, still holds his bookkeeping position, but in this instance it is a case of 'everybody loafs but father.' He is said to be a very much henpecked husband. Mrs. Graham is said to be the financial dictator of the family.
"Now, Mrs. Graham seems to be a woman of much social ambition. Among the necessaries of the best social equipment, you know, is a summer cottage in a society summer resort with sufficient means to support it respectably and leisure in the summer to spend at the resort. It is said that the Grahams have all this. They have purchased or leased a cottage at Twin Lakes, which you know is only about a hundred miles from Hiawatha Institute. I think that every one of us has been there at one time or another. It is about three hundred miles from here.