“Would there be room for us?”
“We would make room,” laughed Jean. “We would send the boys all out to sleep in the bunkhouse, or even in tents. Once you were there, it would be the easiest part of the trip looking after you. But it’s the traveling ’way out there.”
“Well, you see, Miss Murray dear, we have a little towards it even now,” protested Polly eagerly. “Grandfather has laughed at and teased us, and called us the board of lady managers, but last year we had such a perfectly dandy time up in Maine that we formed a regular outing club just among us girls at the Hall. Kate Julian dropped out when she left for college. She’s at Bryn Mawr now. And Crullers is rather uncertain. I am sure she could not go. But that leaves Ruth, Isabel, Sue, Ted, and my own self to reckon. And we’ve every one of us been looking forward to this summer, and saving towards it. You don’t know how much we have denied ourselves.”
“Pin her down to facts, Miss Murray,” insisted the Admiral. “I have not noticed any deprivation at all.”
“Because I never ’fessed up,’ grandfather dear. It was a secret.” Polly’s face was so serious, and yet so full of suppressed enthusiasm that both Jean and the Admiral had to laugh at her. “If I dared, I would tell facts—” she hesitated.
“But you’d better not, Polly,” Jean interrupted. “Not if it concerns the other girls, too. Talk it over with them, and come to see me any afternoon after class. I will write and find out about the summer rates, and the dates. And it doesn’t cost anything to find out, at all events. The very cheapest architecture in the world is building air castles.”
It was on the tip of Polly’s tongue to say that she knew the Admiral would help them, when all at once, she remembered what Jean had told her of the family at the Crossbar ranch, where every one relied on his own efforts, and worked to help the younger ones. Perhaps it would be a wholesome undertaking for the girls to have to earn their own pleasure trip themselves.
It was the happiest and most interesting evening she had spent in a long while, and Jean pronounced it the best during her entire winter East.
“Don’t give up the idea, Polly, until you have to,” she called, last of all, as she went out the front door with the Admiral.
“Oh, I never give up a hope until it is really out of sight,” Polly replied, happily. “Aunty Welcome always says it is better to aim for a star and hit the fence-post, than to aim for the fence-post and hit the ground. All of my arrows point right up at the sky.”