The students at Wellington had been canvassed from A to Z, and with a deal of clerical work, all of the ones who were to join the agricultural club had been enrolled and their time of service settled on and arranged for. Billie had donated six Close-to-Nature houses which were to be set up on the grassy lawn of the old farm. The cots she had wheedled out or her uncle. Farming implements, such as hoes, rakes, spades, gasoline ploughs and cultivators she had, as she expressed it, “blasted out of Grandmother McKym.”
“They don’t understand me in the least, my uncle and my grandmother, but they love me, I really believe, and I fancy they always hope I’ll come to my senses and marry in ‘the set’ some of these days. They are really dears,” Billie explained to Molly as they helped to unload the wagons that had just arrived laden with the tents and implements.
“I think they are certainly very generous,” declared Molly, pulling out a bundle of rakes.
From the beginning these girls had determined not to be dependent upon the merely masculine to fetch and carry for them, and Molly and Billie had pitched in with a will to do without men if need be.
“Oh, yes, generous enough! They are glad when I let them off with nothing more troublesome than writing checks. I believe Uncle Donald was scared stiff that I might insist on his coming down here to help dig. And as for Grandmother,—she would rather ante up thousands of dollars than have to drag her silk skirts around in the wet grass here at The Trenches. They don’t see for an instant that I am kind of patriotic in helping this way. They think I am just a faddist. Maybe I am, but somehow I feel that I have ideals! Do you think I am just a silly goose to think so?”
“No, indeed! I know you have ideals,—I should hate to think you didn’t,—very high ideals,” said Molly, as together they wheeled the barrow laden with hoes and rakes out to the tool house. “I reckon your uncle and grandmother have them, too, only perhaps they are not so open about them.”
“Oh yes, they have them. Uncle Donald loves to talk about them, but Grandmother isn’t so keen on expressing herself. Sometimes I think his ideals are mostly literary and hers sartorial. He is a great reader of belles lettres and Grandmother has an instinct for clothes that is truly remarkable.”
“You have it, too.”
“Well, I do like ’em, but I like to dress other persons better than I do myself. If I had been poor, I’d have gone into the business. I may do it yet, but now until this war is over it seems to me it doesn’t make a bit of difference how anyone is dressed—anybody but Mother Earth. The soil dressed with a good fertilizer is more important than silk raiment.”
“How about literature?” laughed Molly, her friend’s enthusiasm amusing her and at the same time pleasing her. “Do you think writing should stop as well as dressing?”