“Why not ask the boys to help?” asked Lottie, who was doing her best to press her damp clothes by stretching the most important of them over Belle’s trunk, and holding them there with two suitcases. “If I had not gotten these things wet I should have been glad to unpack, but if I leave them this way over night I shall never be able to wear them again.”
“If you knew the boys as well as we do,” Bess put in, “you would know what their help means. They would insist upon trying on every article of clothing they unpacked; wouldn’t they Cora?”
“Something like that, Bess, if they did unpack at all. But, seriously, if you will give me a little help to drag these empty trunks to the porch, I will tell you of a plan I have evolved. Of course we cannot remain this way without a chaperone.”
“Isn’t it perfectly silly?” complained Belle. “As if we were not all capable of taking care of ourselves.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” objected Cora. “I have noticed that in case of emergency, when some strange man happens to poke his nose in at the window, we are all rather glad to acknowledge we are mere babes.”
“And also when we meet them under willow trees,” Marita reminded the boastful ones. “I am sure I agree with Cora that we need a chaperone, and perhaps a policeman or two.”
The girls paused in dragging the baggage toward the front door.
“Just the same,” Marita went on, “Lottie was frightened to-day and she only heard a strange man say, ‘They call them the motor girls.’ As if that was anything terrifying.”
“But it was the way they said it,” Lottie protested. “They just peered at us—and——”
“Now, Lottie,” said Cora, “you have an idea that everyone who looks at us ‘peers’ at us. For my part I was rather flattered by their attention. You see the fame of the motor girls is spreading. But let me now make my proposition,” and she settled down on the rug that was intended to cover the floor—some time.