Those days in camp were a delightful experience and quite an eye-opener as to what girls can do if it is up to them. The Carter girls had been brought up in extravagant luxury, but when their father had a nervous breakdown and they suddenly found themselves with no visible means of support, they jumped in and ran a week-end boarding camp on the side of a mountain in Albemarle, and actually supported the whole family and made some money besides.
They were the busiest people I ever saw, but they managed to tuck in a lot of fun along with it. I certainly hope to see more of those girls, as they interested me tremendously. Douglas was the oldest; she seemed to be the balance wheel for the family. I never saw such poise in a young girl,—not a bit "society," either. She had given up college and was going to stay at home and help. Helen was the next, a stylish creature with more clash and swing to her than even my beloved Tweedles. She was the one who directed the cooking as though she had been catering to boarders all her life, and I was told that she had never thought of such a thing until the spring before, when her father got ill. She evidently had no head for money and I am afraid had an extravagant way with her that gave poor Douglas some trouble.
Then came Nan, a perfect love of a little thing, all poetry and charm but with a conscience that made her do her duty in spite of preferring to live in the clouds. Lucy was the youngest girl and showed promise of being perhaps the best-looking of all the very handsome sisters, but she was too young to say for certain. At any rate, she was a very attractive child. Then there was Bobby, the little brother, an enfant terrible and a perfect little duck.
Mr. Carter was the most pathetic figure I have ever seen: a big, strong man, accustomed to action and power, reduced to letting his daughters make a living for him. He seemed to have lost the power of concentration, somehow. Mr. Tucker said he thought he would get well but it was going to take a long time. He had worked beyond mental endurance trying to keep his family in luxury.
Mrs. Carter was the kind of woman who reconciles one to being a half-orphan, not that my little mother would ever have been that kind, but I mean it is better to be motherless than to have the kind she was. I thought she was very pretty, very gracious, with a wonderful social gift, but the kind of woman who flops at the first breath of disaster. Those Carter girls will have her on their hands just like a baby until the end of time. Whenever she was crossed, she simply went to bed in a ravishing boudoir cap and bed sacque and there she lolled until she carried her point.
The Carters were so interesting to me that I should like to tell more about them but they really should be in a book all to themselves, they and their week-end camp. I had never been right in the mountains before, but after my stay among them I felt that I liked it even better than the seashore. Father said that the last wonderful thing I saw was always the most wonderful thing in the world. He also said that that was just as it should be. That when persons begin to look backward all the time instead of forward, the sutures of their skulls are too firmly knit together and all of their pleasures have to be of memory. New things make no impression on their brains. He said he intended to keep his skull in a semi-pliable state like a baby's and go on looking at the world as a rattle for him to have a good time with.
I had often thought that my dear father spent a terribly humdrum existence for a man of his ability and intense interest in current events. While I loved the country in general and Bracken in particular, I also loved to get out into the world occasionally and get a new outlook, a different view-point as it were; get somewhere where things were happening. Nothing much ever seemed to me to happen in the country.
One day I said as much to him. He smiled and drew me to him.
"Why, honey, things are happening all the time in the country just as much as in town. I like to get away occasionally, too, but not because I want to be where things are happening,—in fact, I like to get away from so many things happening at once as they do in my life here as a country doctor. The things that happen in cities I feel more impersonal about."
"But you like to read about the things that happen in cities."