“I wish Miss Dampier could hear your new English,” said Ellen Webster.
“Well, if you say ‘horrified’ why shouldn’t you say ‘worrified,’ I’d like to know?” Jo demanded. The twins always answered for each other.
“You might say ‘horrid’ to match ‘worried’ instead,” remarked Nita. “Why not? Some day, when I’m not busy, I think I’ll make a new dictionary. I know heaps of lovely words that no dictionary-maker ever dreams of putting in.” She yawned. “But seriously, Jean, I hope your father isn’t having a bad time. My uncle is up in your part of the country, and he seems to be pretty hard hit by the drought.”
“Oh, Father is sure to be feeling it,” Jean said. “But I ’spect it will be like other bad times: they come and go, you know, and everybody jogs along just the same. Father always says one good year makes up for several bad ones. But of course it makes you pretty blue to be living in the middle of the drought, and seeing the sheep and cattle grow poorer and poorer every day. I know what that’s like. So Mother’s letters can’t be very cheery.”
“Jean and I were looking forward to new saddles and riding-kit these hols.,” Jo remarked. “Now I suppose they won’t be able to manage them for us. But it never lasts long. Father will preach economy, and look glum when the bills come in, and of course we’ll economize, somehow—but he’d be awfully wild if he found Mother doing without anything she really wanted! And then the rain will come, and everything will be all right again.”
“You’re a cheery old optimist,” Gladys said, laughing.
“Well, isn’t life cheery? Things always come right again, if you give them time—Mother says so, at any rate. We always have good times, don’t we, Jo?” And Jo grinned at her twin, and said “Rather!”
“My father says,” observed Grace, “that you often get just what you’re looking out for—if you make sure you’re going to have a bad time, it comes, and if you make up your mind that everything will be delightful, then that comes too.” She sighed. “I’ve tried to work out that theory when I was going to the dentist—planned in my own mind that I was going to have something between a pantomime and a picnic. It was, too, I think, for the dentist. But not for me!” She sighed again.
Every one laughed, with a painful absence of sympathy.
“All the same, I believe in your father’s idea, though I think you tried it pretty high,” remarked Helen. “I do think if you believe in your luck it’s more likely to come than if you make up your mind that nothing will go right. It’s the same with people: if you’re quite sure they are decent, well they generally turn out decent.”