“Oh, let me write it myself to Milly; please let me write it myself.”
Flaxie was seven years old now, and had actually learned how to scribble pretty fast. She was very proud of this, for Milly could do nothing but print.
She seized a postal card, ruled it downhill with a pencil, and wrote on it a few cramped-up words, huddled close together like dried apples on a string:
“Dear Twin Little Cousin: My Mamma is going to let me go to your House and go to school to your Dear teacher, becaus I make too much noise, and Grammy is sick with Something in her back and Ime glad but not unless your Mamma is willing. Wont you please to write and say so. My lines are unstraight, and its real too bad Good by Flaxie Frizzle.”
Mrs. Gray smiled when her little daughter asked how to spell unstraight, and smiled again when she saw the card and read, “Dear twin little cousin.”
“Oh, I know better than that,” explained Flaxie, blushing: “we’re not twins a bit, and couldn’t be if we should try, and we’ve known it for quite a long time; but you see, mamma, we’re make-believing, just for fun.”
“I never saw such a child for ‘make-believing,’” said Mrs. Gray, kissing Flaxie, who skipped gayly out of the room to pack her valise.
She always packed it, if there was the least thing said about going away. She didn’t mind the trouble, it was such a pretty valise,—made of brown canvas, with leather straps like a trunk. And she knew Aunt Charlotte would want her at Hilltop,—people always do want little girls, and can’t have too many of them,—and it was best to be ready in season.
So she looked up her little umbrella, with F. F. painted on it in white letters, her school-books that she had been playing school with all over the house, and a half bushel or so of her best dolls. But as she did not go for a week, she had time to lose these things over and over, and some of them were never found any more.
“Now, darling,” said mamma, when Flaxie had bidden good-bye to papa and Preston, and Ninny and the baby, and was just entering the car behind her friend Mrs. Prim. “Now, darling, don’t be troublesome to dear Aunt Charlotte, and if you’ll learn to be good and orderly and sweet like your Cousin Milly, I shall be so glad.”