Grace and Madaline were fascinated by the artistic arrangements of the Dunbar home, but with one member an author and the other a painter, surely unusual taste and effect were to be expected.
"What wonderful plants and vines, and how early for them to be so—profuse!" Grace felt safe in remarking, growing things always seeming exempt from the rule against remarks and criticism.
"Yes, we have a patent hot-house," replied Mrs. Dunbar, "and it works better than the big one out at the garage. You see, Jennie, our cook, is an old fashioned Jersey woman, and she is resourceful, I must admit. See that little shed made of boxes against the kitchen window? Well, Jennie does all her winter gardening in that, heats and irrigates it directly from the kitchen. She claims the steam of cooking is the very best propagator, and we all have to agree with her. Just see the sweet potato vine and the peanuts. Don't they look like the very finest ivies?"
The girls examined the fine growing tendrils that climbed so gracefully from a tiny brick wall, just edging the breakfast room. The "wall" was composed of white tile bricks, and the soft green vines, tumbling over the edges, and capering up on the window ledges, made an effect at once free and conventional.
"Peanuts and sweet potatoes!" exclaimed Madaline. "Who would think they grew such beautiful, soft green vines!"
"I'll leave Cleo to show you about," announced Mrs. Dunbar. "I'm going to a town meeting this morning. We are working for a circulating library, to give reading to the people tied up in the hills. You see stretched out there, over the golf links as far as you can see, are farmers' homes. The folks are always so busy, and always so tired, they very seldom get to our pretty library, so we can see no good reason why we can't send our library put to them by motor. And you youngsters will be interested in knowing this plan includes Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts as distributors. Help yourselves to investigating," she concluded, snatching up her white sailor hat and jabbing it on her head with a most determined if a bit reckless slam. "I'm off till lunch, one thirty, you know. Have a nice time," and Audrey Dunbar was off to tackle the novel project of a traveling library for New Jersey farmers.
Left to themselves the girls literally broke loose, and it was not surprising that Jennie should leave her work more than once, to watch surreptitiously, lest some of her choice baby begonias, set out in their tiny and perishable hand painted pots, come to grief in the rampage of the romping girls.
"Good to populate this big house," commented Jennie, "but swoopy to start out with." At the same time Jennie smiled approvingly as she stopped to watch the three girls run from vase to picture, and from curios to brasses, in their tour of inspection through the artistic home of Guy and Audrey Dunbar. Just now all three chums were squatted on a beautiful old blue Chinese rug, noses almost buried in the silky fiber, each declaring the tones were different blues from those discovered by the other.
A tap-tap of the brass knocker on the "pig-door" off the side porch announced the callers, Lalia and Lucille Hayden, and brought the scout girls up from their rug inspection.
Having met their neighbors the evening previous, the three visitors were soon ready to join them in the proposed tramp over Second Mountain.