"Thank you, I'm a long way outside of that class," retorted Mr. Emerson with some tartness.
"What's the idea of the punching?" asked Helen, of her grandmother.
"You have to show your ticket every time you go outside of the fence or out on the lake," explained Mrs. Emerson. "The odd numbers are punched when you come in—as we do now—and the even numbers when you go out. It circumvents several little tricks that people more smart than honest have tried to play on the administration at one time or another."
"Why do we have to pay, anyway?" asked Roger. "I never went to a summer resort before where you had to pay to go in."
"That's because you never went to one that gave you amusement of all sorts. Here you can go to lectures and concerts all day long and you don't have to pay a cent for them. This entrance fee covers everything of that sort. Where else on the planet can you go to something like twenty or more events in the course of the day for the sum of twelve and a half cents which is about what the grown-up season ticket holder pays for his fun."
"Nowhere, I'll bet," responded Roger promptly. "Are there really as many as that?"
"There are a great many more if you count in all the things that are going on at the various clubs and all the classes in the Summer Schools."
"Don't you have to pay for those?"
"There's a small fee for all instruction because classes require teachers, and teachers must be paid; and the clubs call for a small fee because they have expenses which they must meet. But all the public entertainments are free."
"This is just the place I've been looking for ever since Father gave me an allowance," grinned Roger, whose struggles with his account book were a family joke.