“Because he’s a joy forever,” said Lily, “and with him here the next two or three days of settling down to work would be just fun. Now they’ll be deeply, darkly, beautifully blue; wont they, Kit?”
“Yes; the first days are generally poky,” said Katie, preparing to record her arrival in her new diary.
“We can have fun enough,” said Edna, “if Mrs. Abbott wont be too strait-laced and antiquated to let us.”
“How, for instance?”
“There’s a circus coming. I saw the bills posted up at the station,” replied Edna—“lions and bears, and a four-armed man, and a man with no arms at all who takes your picture with his toes, and lots of jolly things.”
“They wont do us any good,” said Bell Burgoyne, “for, you know, Mrs. Abbott disapproves of circuses.”
“Well, they are low,” said Edna, “but I think it would be fun to go to one of the side-shows, as they call them, and have our fortunes told by the Egyptian sphinx.”
“O, I’ve seen a picture of that kind of being. It’s just a young woman with an elaborately frizzed head and a handsome face, and nothing else except a small section of throat,” explained Lily. “She perches lightly on a wash-stand and answers questions, I believe.”
“But how can she talk without any arms and legs?” said Louie Field, skeptically.
“Unless she uses the sign language of the deaf and dumb, I think limbs and members would be less indispensable than lungs,” said Lily. “But I don’t understand, so I can’t explain.”