Jack and Cynthia, the twins, came next in age, and they were just fourteen. They looked alike though Jack was much the taller of the two, and his hair did not curl so tightly as Cynthia's. She sat on the steps of the piazza. Her sailor hat was cast on the ground at her feet, and her pretty golden-brown hair was, as usual, somewhat awry.
It was one of the trials of Edith's life that Cynthia's hair would not keep smooth.
Jack lay at full length on the grass, sometimes flat on his back, staring at the sky, sometimes rolling over, the more easily to address his sisters.
Jack had a project in his mind, and was very much in earnest. Cynthia, of course, was already on his side—she had known of it from the first moment the idea popped into his head, but Edith had just been told, and she needed convincing.
Janet and Willy, "the children," were playing at the other end of the porch. They were only six and five, and did not count in the family discussions.
"There's money in it, I'm sure," said Jack; "and if I can only get father to agree with me and advance some money, I can pay him back in less than a year."
"Papa hasn't much money to spare just now," said Edith, "and I have always heard that there was a good deal of risk about raising chickens from an incubator."
"My dear girl," returned Jack, with an air of lofty authority, "allow me to say that you don't know much about it. I've been reading upon hens for two days, and I find that, allowing for all risks—bad eggs, inexperience, weasels, and skunks, and diseases, you're sure to make some profit at the end of a year. Now, I'm late in thinking of it, I know. To-morrow is the 1st of May, and I couldn't get more than three hatches this summer, but that would probably pay the cost of the incubator. I can get a first-rate one for forty dollars, and I can buy one 'brooder.' If I bought one I could make the others like it."
"But your eggs?" said Edith. "You would have to pay a great deal for eggs."
"Eggs would be about five or six dollars a hundred, and it takes two hundred to fill the machine. I should want to get a fine breed, of course—Brahmas, or Cochins, or Leghorns, probably, and they cost more; but, you see, when they begin to lay, there comes my money right back to me."