"You'd better buy an electric heater for the cats," suggested Winnie. "I'm forever taking 'em out of the oven; some day I'll forget to look, and there will be baked cats when you come down."
Shirley was distressed at this dismal prediction, but Sarah did not take it to heart.
"I think, after all," she said meditatively, "I'll buy a hen and keep chickens."
"What are you going to buy with your money, Shirley lamb?" asked Rosemary, as Sarah fell to planning a chicken yard.
"A doll I guess," said Shirley who had had three that morning.
When Sarah reminded her of that fact, Aunt Trudy protested.
"No one is to attempt to dictate in any way," she said with unaccustomed firmness. "When I was a child I was never allowed to spend a cent as I wanted to and I gave you each this money to do with exactly as you please. If you spend it foolishly, all right, I don't care. But I want each one of you to get what you want, whether or not it pleases some one else. I could have bought you what I thought you ought to have, but that's the kind of presents I had as a child and the only kind. And my goodness, didn't I hate 'em!"
The girls stared a little at this outburst and then the doctor laughed.
"Well all I can say," he remarked drolly as he pushed back his chair in answer to the summons of the telephone, "is that it is lucky Christmas comes only once a year. Otherwise, Aunt Trudy, you'd have us completely demoralized."
Spending their Christmas money gave the three girls a good deal of pleasure during holiday week and a letter from their mother was another pleasant incident. Mrs. Willis wrote that the fur coat and the kimona had made her the envy of the whole sanatorium and she was so proud of them both that she cried whenever she looked at them!