"Say, if I get rich can't I do like I want to—like other rich folks?"
"You most certainly cannot. Rich people, if they are to be loved, must be even more careful in their conduct than poor folks."
"We-ell," confessed the freckled little girl frankly, "I'd rather be rich than be loved. If I can't be both easy, I'll be rich."
"Such amazing worldliness!" sighed Amy, raising her hands in mock horror.
But Jessie Norwood truly wished the little girl to be nice. Poor little Henrietta, however, had much to unlearn. She chattered continually about the island she owned and the riches she was to enjoy. The smaller children of Dogtown followed her—and the green parasol—about as though they were enchanted.
"'Tis a witch she certainly is," declared Mrs. Foley. "She's bewitched them all, so she has. But I'm lost widout her, meself. When a woman has six—and them all boys—and a man that drinks——"
This statement of her personal affairs had been so often heard by the three girls that they all tried to sidetrack Mrs. Foley's complaint. It was Jessie, however, who advanced a really good reason for getting out of the Foley house.
"I promised Monty Shannon I would look at his radio set," she said, jumping up. "You will excuse us for a little, Mrs. Foley? You are not going back to Stratfordtown at once, Bertha?"
"Before long. I have only hired the car for the forenoon. The man has another job this afternoon. And I must find that Henrietta again," for the freckle-faced little girl was as lively, so Amy said, as a water-bug—"one of those skimmery things with long legs that dart along the surface of the water."
The trio went out and across the cinder-covered yard to the Shannon house. The immediate surroundings of Dogtown were squalid, although its site upon the edge of Lake Mononset might have been made very pleasant indeed.