“You might as well roll,” advised Frieda. “You can’t wetten yourself more than you are already, and it is pleasant to roll.”
“That’s a matter of taste!” panted Polly, balancing herself on the top of the fence.
170Suddenly Frieda gave a little shriek. Polly instantly fell forward into the mud, her skirt catching on all the barbs in the fence and rending itself horribly. Frieda, full of wild exclamations of pity and remorse, helped her up and wiped the thickest of the mud from her once piquant face.
“It was the cow,” she confessed. “I saw him coming from afar and I squealed. I did not know it would make you tumble, but I had to squeal. I fear cows. I have great alarm before them.”
“I forgive you,” Polly was weak with mirth. “But we’ve got to get into that house and telephone for some one to come out from town and take us home. We could never walk in these roads, and I should tie myself all up in knots if I walked in this shredded skirt. One more little spurt, Frieda, and we’re at the kitchen door!”
It looked for a minute as though they would never get beyond the door. The respectable lady who met them there was scarcely to blame if she judged a little by outward appearance. Polly’s efforts to be suave were discounted by the muddy look of her eye, and the fact that water was dripping from her hair into her face.
“Won’t you please let us come in and telephone for a carriage, and then wait for it?” she pleaded. “I will gladly pay for the use of the ’phone.” Then it came over her sickeningly that she had no money with her.
171“I’m Polly Osgood,” she said. “My father is the Osgood of Osgood and Brown, Lawyers.”
“You don’t say! Come right in. I’m Amanda B. Mills, and Lawyer Osgood has been my counsel for twenty-one years and more. I’d never a-kept you waitin’ out there a minute, if I’d known ’twas you. Is this your sister? Don’t wipe your shoes. Come right in. There’s other folks been caught in this rain, too.”
She stepped back, still speaking, and invited them into the kitchen. Polly and Frieda, stumbling a little, blinded as they were by the water dripping from their hair, followed her. As they entered the room, there was a moment’s silence, then a burst of laughter and exclamations.