“Gretli did not touch it with the end of her finger! She told me, of course, what to do. ‘Take this and that! do thus and so!’ but not a finger did she put to it. Wait a little! When Margoton next has sour cream, I will make another, and you will see.”
“It must have been rather fun!” said Vivette. “I should like to make cheese, I think. Will you teach me, Moriole?”
“My dear! it would ruin your hands!” Jacqueline examined her own pearly fingertips, over which she spent much of the “meditation hour” when we sat alone in our little rooms and were supposed to think of holy things. Then with a glance at Vivette’s brown, rather stubby hands, she added, “But it might not after all make so much difference!”
“But, Moriole!” said Stephanie, who had been listening eagerly, “the animals! all those terrible animals! were you not in perpetual terror? Me, I never expected to see you alive again. I wept the whole of every night—”
“Thou snorest prettily in thy sleep all the same, Stephanie!” cried Rose Marie. “Heavens! it was a litany to all the saints at once!”
“You shan’t tease my Stephanie!” Honor was slipping back naturally into her school attitude of championing the weak. “Stephanie dear, the animals were darling; but perfectly darling! You have only to learn to know them. Why, Bimbo ate bread from my hand, and danced for me when I held his forefeet. It is true he tried to butt me every day, but he never succeeded. Zitli was too quick, and always caught him over the nose with his crutch.”
“The lame boy? Was he possible at all, Honor?” It was Jacqueline who asked. “Of course the big Twins are very nice in their way: but to be shut up a whole week in a peasant hovel with—”
Honor’s eyes flashed; she felt the blood surging into her cheeks, and she clenched her hands tight in the vain effort to keep it down.
“A hovel?” she cried, and her voice trembled, spite of all she could do. “The Châlet des Rochers is simply the most delightful house I ever was in. The people are the dearest and best people—except Madame and our Sister—I have ever seen, and the week I spent there was the happiest time of my whole life!”