“That’s just it. We’ll stay around home the way we always do, have a few picnics, and a few lawn parties, and all that sort of thing. We shan’t have any real vacation, anything that is different from everything else we do the whole year round, shall we?”
Five heads shook in unison.
“But, Polly, it would take so much money,” began Ruth, picking one of her roses abstractedly to pieces.
“If we went any distance at all,” Kate Julian laid down the book she had been looking over while Polly talked. She met Polly’s eager glance, and smiled. Kate was nearly eighteen, but both Ruth and herself were firm, true friends of Polly’s, and the Admiral said he approved because Polly needed ballast now and then to keep her steady on her course.
“Oh, it’s quite a distance,” exclaimed Polly. “It wouldn’t be any fun to go along the shore here.”
“Anybody’d think to hear you, Polly, that you had a whole island to colonize, and an airship to travel in,” Kate teased. “I think you’re just blowing a lovely bubble.”
Even Polly had to laugh, for at Calvert Hall her rainbow bubbles that would float so beautifully for a whole minute, then turn into air, were a steady source of fun among the girls.
“Well, you may laugh, but I have the island even if I haven’t any airship,” she said.
There was the soft rustle of silk outside, and Miss Calvert stood in the doorway. She was not the typical principal of a school for girls, Honoria Calvert. There were too many “laughing wrinkles,” as Polly called them, around her gray eyes; and the corners of her generous mouth, and the way the girls clustered about her, told more plainly than words, how dear she was to them all.
“The Admiral is asking for you, Polly, my dear,” she said. “Won’t the girls excuse you, now?”