“Talking’s work,” complained Archie. “That’s redundancy.”
“It is, when you keep interrupting,” cried Bertha Davis. “Go on, Catherine. Don’t mind him. Just how can we work?”
“Well, the room will have to be cleaned thoroughly, and we girls can do most of that if the boys will help a little. And there will have to be some plain shelves put up for the books.”
“Me for the carpenter job!” cried a long-legged youth who had lain thus far in the shade of his own hat, in entire silence and apparent unconsciousness. “It’s just what I want to cure my brain fever.”
“Overstudy? Or overwork reading postals last week?” asked Agnes, smiling into Bert’s half-shut eyes.
“It’s more likely fatty degeneration of the brain, if it’s Bert Wyman that has it,” said an emphatic voice, and a spruce energetic maiden joined the group. “I just got in on the 10:10, and Mother said you were all over here. What’s before the house?”
“Nothing. We’re all on the house,” explained Archie dryly, but Polly answered the question with careful courtesy. Dorcas listened.
44“Very well,” she said, when Polly finished. “If it is in order, I move you, Madam President, that we proceed to clean the library at once.”
“O, Dorcas, not to-day!” groaned two or three, while Max remarked in an aside to no one that if it was in order it shouldn’t need cleaning.
“Why not to-day?” asked Dorcas briskly. “How you-all can loaf around the way you do is more than I can comprehend. Dot, your hair is coming down.”