"I thought you might like to go on a picnic," said the young lady, helplessly. "I thought all little girls liked—"
"Picnic? When?" cried Ardelia, moved instantly to interest. "I'm goin'! Is it the Dago picnic?"
The young lady shuddered, and seizing the hand which she imagined to have had the least to do with the refuse, she led Ardelia away—the first stage of her journey to Arcady.
Later arrayed in starched and creaking garments which had been made for a slightly smaller child, Ardelia was transported to the station, and for the first time introduced to a railroad car. She sat stiffly on the red plush seat while the young lady talked reassuringly of daisies and cows and green grass. As Ardelia had never seen any of these things, it is hardly surprising that she was somewhat unenthusiastic.
"You can roll in the daisies, my dear, and pick all you want—all!" she urged eagerly.
"Aw right," she answered, guardedly.
The swelteringly hot day, and the rapid unaccustomed motion combined to afflict her with a strange internal anticipation of future woe. Once last summer, when she ate the liquid dregs of the ice-cream man's great tin, and fell asleep in the room where her mother was frying onions, she had experienced this same foreboding, and the climax of that dreadful day lingered yet in her memory.
At last they stopped. The young lady seized her hand, and led her through the narrow aisle, down the steep steps, across the little country station platform, and Ardelia was in Arcady.
A bare-legged boy in blue overalls and a wide straw hat then drove them many miles along a hot, dusty road, that wound endlessly through the parched country fields. Finally they turned into a driveway, and drew up before a gray wooden house. A spare, dark-eyed woman in a checked apron advanced to meet them.