CHAPTER VI.
All winter we had been talking about the Fair, reading up about the Fair, making plans for the Fair; and Belle declared that even if she never saw the Fair she would be glad it had been, on account of the amount of preparatory information she had laid up.
We did get off at last in the end of June, the whole of us, including Mary, of course—my first experience of traveling in her company. We went to Chicago by boat,—a night's crossing,—and a rare time I had securing berths for the family in the overcrowded propeller. I was thankful for an "extension," a sort of shell run out between two staterooms and partitioned off by curtains and poles. The boys had to sleep on sofas, floor, anywhere, which to them was but the beginning of the fun.
The first of my Herculean labors at an end, I was enjoying my smoke aft in the cool of the evening, when Belle came back to me, her brow drawn up into what I had begun to call the "Mary wrinkle."
"David, I'm afraid you'll have to talk to that girl. She's sitting up in the bow there flirting with one of the waiters, and though I've sent Watty twice after her, she won't stir."