"Frances does not stand in need of missionary work. Gwennie does. Anyway, she's coming up the first week in August, and Mother says that either you or I can go back with her for two weeks before school opens. Do you want to go, Jean? Because I really and truly don't give a rap about it. I'm afraid to go for fear I'll like it and won't want to come back. I'm just dead afraid of the schools up here this winter." Kit's tone was tragic. "This year means so much to me in my work. I was getting along gloriously, you know that, Jean, and from what the girls here tell me, the schools can't touch ours in finish."
"How are they in beginnings?" Jean asked laughingly. "You poor old long-sufferer, I know what you mean. Why don't you ask Dad and Mother to let you board down at the Cove with the Phelpses, and keep up your old class work right there until you finish High School anyway?"
"Seems like a desertion," said Kit. "We're here and we should stick it out. I think you'd better go back with Gwennie."
"We ought to talk it over with Mother thoroughly. She thinks she's giving us a week of extra pleasure, probably, and to us it's a temptation that we're afraid we can't withstand, isn't that it?"
"Well, I feel like this, it's like taking a soldier out of the trenches and throwing him into a seaside week end."
"Kit, you always exaggerate fearfully. You're a regular Donna Quixote, tilting at windmills."
"But are you willing to go back?"
"I think we'll let Helen go. She will enjoy it and not take it a bit seriously. Helen's poise will carry her through any crisis triumphantly."
Kit agreed that the thought of Helen was really a stroke of diplomatic genius. The waves and billows of circumstance only buoyed Helen up, lighter than ever. They never went over her or disarranged her curls a particle. Whenever Kit had one of her customary "brain storms" over something and Helen suggested that she was "fussy," Kit always retaliated with the statement that she was the only member of the family with any temperament. Jean had imagination, and Doris gave promise of much sentiment, but when it came to real temperament Kit believed that she had the full Robbins allowance.
"You can call it what you like, Kit. I'd leave off the last two syllables, though," Helen would say serenely.