“Yes, we won’t have any trouble with our eight, but we may have trouble not making it eighteen,” said Cleo. “We always have a lot of calls from girls who want to come in, you know.”
“Yes, but we must be efficient,” insisted the logical leader. “We couldn’t take in girls and let them call themselves Scouts if they had not gone through all the tests.”
“Of course not,” agreed Louise. She was always apt to agree on limitations. Louise was a bit conservative that way.
“But we may find other girls at the lake who are qualified—who are regular Scouts, you know,” put in Cleo the democrat.
“A patrol should be composed of eight,” insisted Corene, “and when a rule of that kind is decided by the organization we may be sure it is the best. So let it be eight.”
“Remember those famous lines, ‘We Are Seven’?” recalled Cleo. “We may transpose them to ‘We Are Eight’ and I’ll get brother Jerry to put a tune to them. Oh, really, girls, I can see the camp all ready. Shall we have to build it, Corey?”
“If you don’t run over me in the telling I may get something told, bye-and-bye,” complained Corene. “We may have to build our camp if we want one far enough away from the cottages, and I don’t think any other kind is worth while.”
“No, of course it isn’t,” agreed Julia. “We don’t want to put up a few curtains in a garage and pay ten dollars to have an artistic sign made for it, then call that combination a camp.”
This brought out the rollicking spirits for which the little group was justly famous, and the cushion fight that followed was a spasm of pure mirth. Little girls they were, indeed; although each of them had earned a grammar grade certificate that opened to her the doors of “High,” yet the spirit of care-free little-girlishness was still happily theirs, and it was a matter of complete congeniality that bound them together, year after year, from Primary to Grammar, and now from Grammar to High.
“If we are always going to end up with some silly nonsense,” said Julia sagely, although she was personally more responsible for pillow tossing than were the others, “I don’t see how we will ever get anything planned.”