“Let me wait on Mr. Walpole, because I found him; Chum was starving,” said Florimel, and they all laughed.
“So am I,” said the guest, accepting the skipping Saratoga potatoes which Florimel aimed at his plate, or as many of them as arrived there. “But my name is Mark.”
“Nice, handy one, too; can’t be shortened,” said Win. “We’ll all be first-name friends from now on. I’m the oldest of the lot and I’m only six years older than Mark. What’s your specialty, Mark? Any special work you’re after?”
“Paying work,” said Mark, with a laugh. “I did intend to study a good while longer. I’m not prepared for any special work; not ready for it, I’m afraid, but it has to be found, if it’s wrapping grocery parcels. I’d like to work with a botanist; I know more about botany than anything else.”
“And Mr. Moulton is botany crazy, in an amateurish way!” cried Mary.
“I wonder how a person is an amateur lunatic,” murmured Jane.
“Now, who’d expect you, of all people, to ask that, Jane?” said Win suggestively. “Mr. Moulton is at work on a tremendous book, more tremendous than it will ever be book, I’m afraid. He’ll never finish it! ‘A Study of the Flora of New York,’ he calls it, and he’s making a herbarium as big as the book. Maybe he’d take you to help on it.”
“If I could do it,” said Mark doubtfully.
“If nobody can possibly eat another bite, nor drink another drop, suppose we go out and watch the stars come out, and wait for Mr. and Mrs. Moulton to come over,” suggested Mary.
“If it was anybody else, or we were anybody else,” said Florimel, “and Mr. and Mrs. Moulton was their guardian—Mr. Moulton, really, but Mrs. Moulton does more guarding than he does—we’d call them Uncle Austin and Aunt Althea, but we never do. Mr. and Mrs. to them means just as much as uncle and aunt do when other girls say it to people who aren’t any relation. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton like us to call them what they really are; not relations, when they’re not.”