“Nonsense!” cried Jessie. “They were Darry’s first long pants, and you were mad to think he was so much older than you that he could put on men’s clothes.”
“Dear me!” sighed Amy. “You make me out an awful creature, Jess Norwood. But, never mind. Darry has paid me up and to spare for that unladylike trick. He has been a trial—and is so yet. He doesn’t know how to pick a decent necktie. His shirts—some of them—are so loud that you can see him coming clear across The Green. Why! they tell me that his shirts are as well known in New Haven, and almost as prominently mentioned by the natives, as the Hartley Memorial Hall; and almost nobody gets away from the City of Elms without being obliged to see that.”
“What a reckless talker you are, Amy!” Jessie said, smiling. “And I will not hear you run Darry down. I think too much of him myself.”
“Don’t let him guess it,” said the absent Darry’s sister, with a grin. “It will spoil him—make him proud and hard to hold.”
“That’s a good one!” laughed Nell. “You think Darry can be as easily spoiled by praise as the Chinese servant Reverend tells about that he had in California. This was before I was born. Father and mother got a Coolie right at the dock. You could do that in those days. And John scarcely knew a word of English, not even the pidgin variety.
“But Reverend says that when John acquired a few English words he was so proud that there was no holding him. He asked the name of every new object he saw and mispronounced it usually in the most absurd manner. Once John found a sparrow’s nest in the grapevine and shuffled into Reverend’s study to tell him about it.
“‘Is there anything in the nest yet, John?’ Reverend asked him.
“‘Yes,’ the Chinaman declared, puffed up with his knowledge of the new language, ‘Spallow alle samme got pups.’”
While they chattered and laughed the three girls were as busy as bees with the new radio arrangement. Amy said that Jessie kept them so hard at work that it did not seem at all as though they were “vacationing.” It was good, healthy work for all.
“It does seem awfully quiet here without Hen,” went on Amy, hammering on a board with a heavy hammer and making the big room where the radio set was, ring. “She keeps the place almost as tomb-like as a boiler shop—what?”