“Why, the idea,” Sally exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. “I think that’s awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go.”
Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps. She was rather like Buzzy and Sally, curly-haired and young-looking, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.
“Buzzy’s told us so much about all of you up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you,” she said pleasantly. “You’re Jean, aren’t you? Of course Sally can go along if she wants to. Don’t forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place.”
Jean never forgot that morning. They rode miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the material upon which she had to work.
At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.
“Ingeborg belonged to a basketball team,” Astrid said. “I can swim and play tennis best.”
The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Rebecca’s. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother’s skirts at the stranger on horseback and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.
“They like very much to come, you see?” she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. “Tony, I have shame for you, ma petite. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, quick!”
Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to give to Jean and Sally. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must ride around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.
Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.