Jeannette shrugged her shoulders, and said, “I shall be glad to help always, if you wish to make me one of you.”
“What do you think of that?” Anne said on the way home. “Kit, you certainly have discovered a flower that was born to blush unseen.”
“It will take her out of her shell, anyway,” Kit replied happily. “And I do think the girls came up to the mark splendidly. How I’d like to hear what they’re saying about us now, behind our backs, but they acted their parts nobly when I swung that door open, and there stood, just Jeannette!”
12. Homesick
No qualms of homesickness visited Kit the first two months after school opened. Not even New England could eclipse the glory of autumn when it swept in full splendor over this corner of the Lake States. Down east there was a sort of middle-aged relaxation to this season of the year.
But here autumn came as a gypsy. The stretches of forest that fringed the ravines rioted in color. The lakes seemed to take on the very deepest sapphire blue. No hush lay over the land as it did in the East, but there were wild sudden storm flurries, a feeling in the air as if there might be a regular tornado any minute.
Hardly a Saturday passed but what Kit was included in some fall picnic hike or else she was off to a football game. The Dean never joined these, but occasionally Della did and thoroughly enjoyed them. And once, toward the end of November, in the very last of Indian summer weather, they took a weekend tour up to Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls.
“I only wish,” Rex said, “that we could come up here next spring when they have their big logging time. It’s one of the greatest sights you ever saw, Kit. I have seen the logs jammed out there in the river until they looked like a giant’s game of jackstraws. Maybe we could arrange a trip, don’t you think so, Mom?”
“I don’t see any reason why not,” replied Mrs. Bellamy.