By the time the cake and bananas came the girls felt as if they couldn’t eat another thing. But they did. It was delightful lying around the fire talking and eating and laughing. It was one of those mild days which come in May sometimes, bright, with a little breeze. After awhile somebody started a Camp Fire song, and one by one they all joined in. After that they lay quiet for awhile, talking and being lazy.
When they began to clear away Edith declared that she didn’t dare go near the spring again. So it was Winona and Louise who took the few things there were to wash, the cocoa-kettle and dish-pan and drinking-cups and the silver, over to the spring. It was pleasant, lazy work, not a bit like home dish-washing. Louise splashed the things up and down in the running water, and Winona dried them.
“Isn’t it nice?” sighed Winnie. “Oh, I do wish we could camp outdoors all this summer, instead of living in hot houses! Don’t you always hate to sleep indoors when it’s hot?”
Louise rolled over on her back and looked at the sky.
“Yes, I think I do,” she spoke thoughtfully. “You have to, though. Out in California they say everybody has sleeping-porches, and never thinks of going inside at night. I wish people had them here.”
A brilliant idea came to Winona—which, by the way, she afterward carried out. “Our side-porch is almost all screened. I wonder if mother wouldn’t let me sleep there? I’m going to ask her, anyway.”
“I wish I could, too,” breathed Louise, “but our side-porch is where everybody goes by—that’s the worst of living on a corner. I know I never could break the milkman and the baker of contributing rolls and milk on top of me in the early morning!”
“What a splendid idea! Then you could have ‘breakfast in your bed,’ like Harry Lauder,” said Winnie, and both girls stopped to giggle. “But honestly,” began Winnie again, as she reached out for some long grass near her and began to plait it, “don’t you think we can all camp out this summer?”
“Here?”
“N-no, not here—at least, I don’t believe they’d let us, the people who own it, I mean. But there must be somewhere that we could go, somewhere not too far off to cost a lot to get there.”