"What will you do with all yours?" Peter asked.
"I wish we three could go about the world together," Alix answered. "I'd love to see Japan and India--I'd like to see burning-ghats on the sacred Gunga!" she added, cheerfully. "But I don't know--money doesn't buy you much!" she yawned. "Perhaps I'll go to some Old Ladies' Home, and give each of the old girls one hundred dollars a quarter--wouldn't they have fun, buying scarfs and wool and caps?"
"Their families would immediately remove them, for the revenue," Peter suggested. He was grinning at her; he felt suddenly the wholesomeness and safety of her absurdity and originality. He liked the characteristic earnestness with which, in the very act of snapping off her bedroom light, before going out to the sleeping-porch, she widened her eyes at him, and frowned in concentrated thought.
"Then I'll give them fifty dollars a quarter!" she decided. "Just enough to buy them some little things, you know, brass tea-kettles, flannel underwear, whatever they wanted! Presents--they must always want to be making Christmas presents." And she yawned again. "Shut your door, Pete, if you read," she said. "The light shines against the trees, and it's right in my eyes!" But ten minutes later he heard her call through the door, "Or I could give it on condition that they stayed in the home and didn't let their families get it!" and grinned again over his book.
After that there was silence, and gradually the little sounds of the summer night made themselves heard again. Alix's light was out. Cherry came, trailing her thin wrapper, to the porch bed opposite her sister's bed and slipped into it with only a brief good-night. But Peter read on deep into the first hours of the morning.
Kow Yu, flinging the striped blue tablecloth over the porch table the next day at the noon hour, and clinking knives and forks, was questioned by his master.
"You go catchem 'nother plate, Kow!" Peter said.
"Missy no come!" Kow answered, unruffled. "Him say no can come!"
"Cherry!" Peter shouted. "Did Alix say she wasn't coming to lunch?"
"N-n-not to me!" Cherry answered from the garden. She came up to the porch, with her hands full of short-stemmed roses.