“Oh, golly,” laughed Jean, “let’s go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let’s go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all.”
“Better ask the Mill girls over while you’re about it,” Sally suggested, so they made one last stop at the red sawmill in the valley below Woodhow. “They’re Americans. My friend lives here, Lucy Peckham. She’s got five sisters and three brothers, but Lucy’s the whole family herself.”
The three brothers worked in the sawmill after school, and Jean didn’t see them, but Lucy sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair streaming behind her. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Lucy you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.
“Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds,” she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. “How do you do, Miss Craig—”
“Oh, call me Jean,” Jean said quickly. “We’re close neighbors. If we didn’t hear your whistle we’d never know what time it is.”
“Well, we’ve been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother hasn’t been well, and all the girls are younger than I, so I help around the house. We’ve got twins in our family, did Sally tell you? Sally and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We’ve had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that’s Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn’t want to repeat. Somehow, it didn’t show any imagination.” She laughed and so did Jean. “So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They’re too cute for anything. Wish you’d all come down and see us Sunday afternoon.”
“Lucy’d ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon,” Sally said as they finally turned up the home road. “She’s just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn’t mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that’s all. And even if she isn’t pretty, she’s got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I think she’s wonderful. Isn’t her hair red?”
“It’s coppery and it’s beautiful,” Jean answered decidedly. “I think she’s swell. Why can’t Anne and Charlotte buckle down and help, so that Lucy can get away once in a while?”
“Her mother says she can’t do without her.”
Jean pondered over that and finally decided it was too deep for her to settle. It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Sally home, she rode into the home drive, feeling as if she really had a line on Elmhurst girls. Tommy came running down to meet her as she jumped off, while Buzzy came to take care of Princess. Tommy’s eyes were shining with excitement.