“I shall miss you terribly, Polly,” Betty returned wistfully; her bright color had gone in the last few weeks and there were slight shadows under her gray eyes. “Still I feel sure that under the circumstances it is best for you to go. You are too restless anyhow to have wanted to stay in Woodford and the new life with the new people and sights will make you much happier. You will probably have a good deal of liberty at a New York boarding school and you’ll be able to go to the theater now and then and do many of the things you will like. But Mollie and I hope you will come back for Christmas and will write us pretty often.”
Polly looked thoughtfully from her friend to her sister. “I know I am an absolutely selfish person and I would rather neither one of you would even attempt to deny it. I am not leaving my home though simply because I am restless. The truth is I simply can’t get used to mother’s being married to Mr. Wharton and to living in their great ugly house instead of our own beloved cottage. I don’t like Frank Wharton and though Mr. Wharton is very kind and wants to do everything for Mollie and me, he is one of those dreadfully literal persons, so I am afraid we never will understand one another.”
“But you used to say, Polly, that you were tired of our small house and that you wanted to live in a big one with lots of money and servants. And now you have it you are dying to get away.” And Mollie sighed, for the thought of being parted from her sister even as far away as the next fall, was very hard to bear, and yet she would not leave her mother, since for both of her daughters to go away would look like a reflection upon her marriage.
“Heigh, ho!” laughed Polly. “Perhaps I have made some such statement in the past but I suppose I wanted to get rich in my own little way, like I wish to do everything else. And inconsistency, which is not a jewel, is certainly Polly O’Neill. But don’t let’s talk about me any more, it’s Betty’s birthday. However, I would like to register this statement— Sylvia Wharton is the most extraordinary person I ever met. And what Sylvia starts out to do in this world she’ll do. It was Sylvia who saw I wasn’t happy in her home, Sylvia who talked things over first to me, and then suggested my departure to mother and her father. And though our parents were both horribly opposed to the idea at first, Sylvia brought them around without any arguments or excitement simply by continuing to make plain statements of the facts.”
“Well, the wheel of fortune we hear so much about has truly turned, dear, and you’re rich and I’m poor and now we must wait to see what will happen next,” Betty remarked, hearing a faint knock at her bedroom door and moving forward to open it, but in passing she stopped and kissed Polly lightly on the forehead. “Don’t look as though you were the wheel, Polly child, and had made the changes. I am not going to be half so miserable being poor as you girls think I will. Just think of how much more self-respecting I am going to feel if, when I go to bed some night, I can say to myself: ‘Betty Ashton has earned her salt to-day.’”
Betty now opened her door and there on the threshold stood Rose Dyer with a bunch of pink roses and Faith with a pot of lemon verbena in her hand. Faith was not yet well enough to go home to the boarding house in Boston, so Miss Dyer had brought her to her own home in Woodford, where she and Mammy were still to look after the odd child.
On the arrival of Polly and Mollie a few moments before, Betty had not been in the least surprised. The two girls usually ran in to see her every afternoon now and had been giving her birthday presents for nearly as many years as she could remember, but when Rose and Faith also appeared she realized that the members of the Sunrise club might all be coming in to see her during the afternoon in just this same quiet fashion. And the next instant she was convinced when Sylvia solemnly appeared with a box of candy, which she thrust awkwardly at her.
“It’s against our Camp Fire rules to eat candy, Betty, and I don’t approve of it or like it very much myself, but I couldn’t think of anything else to bring when Polly and Mollie went off without me; and there won’t be enough to make so many people sick.”
During the laughter over Sylvia’s remark, Nan Graham walked shyly in through the now open door, bearing a loaf of cake.
“I couldn’t bring a real present, Betty,” she explained with far more grace and sweetness than one could have dreamed possible of so rough and untrained a girl the year before, “but this is the kind of cake you used to like when I made it at the cabin and I thought you wouldn’t mind eating a piece on your birthday for old times’ sake.”