"Nothing like that, Neale O'Neil," interrupted Agnes quickly. "You would better sing pretty small, young man. Remember you are outnumbered."
"Yes," said Tess sedately, "you haven't even Sammy here now to take your part, you know, Neale."
"True for you, Tessie," agreed Neale. "I am in an infinitesimal minority."
Dot's eyes opened wide as these long words sounded from the boy's lips, and she gulped just as though she were swallowing them down for digestion. Agnes' eyes twinkled as she asked the smallest girl:
"Did you get those two, honey?"
"Don't make fun of her," admonished Ruth, aside.
"Well," sighed Dot, soberly, "I do hope I'll get into big words in the reading book this next term. I love 'em. Why! Tess is awfully far ahead of me; she can spell words in four cylinders!"
And that closed the evening meal with a round of laughter that Dot did not understand.
CHAPTER V
THE SHEPARDS
"Just think!" Agnes said to Ruth. "For the first time since we came to live at the old Corner House and call it our owniest own, we are going to have real visitors. Oh, dear, me, Ruth, I wish we could have week-end parties, and dances, and all sorts of society things. I do!"
"Mercy, Agnes! And you with your hair in plaits?"
"Whose fault is that, I'd like to know," responded the beauty a bit sharply. "I'm the only girl in my set who doesn't put her hair up. Myra Stetson has worn hers up for a year – "
"She keeps house for her father and has not attended school for six months," Ruth reminded her.
"Well, Eva Larry puts hers up when her mother has company. And Pearl Howard – "
"Never mind the catalog of your friends, dear," put in Ruth, quietly. "We know you are a much abused little girl. But your hair in plaits you'd better wear for a while yet.
"As for week-end parties and the like, I will speak to Mr. Howbridge and perhaps we can give some parties this winter."
"With the kids in them!" grumbled Agnes. "I want real grown-up parties."
"Let us wait till we are really grown up for them," and the elder sister laughed.
"Goodness! you are grown up enough, Ruth Kenway," Agnes declared. "You might be married at your age. Mrs. Mac says she was."
"Hush!" exclaimed Ruth, almost shocked by such a suggestion. "You do get the most peculiar ideas in your head, Aggie."
"There's nothing peculiar about marrying," said the other girl saucily. "I'm sure everybody's 'doing it.' It's quite the proper thing. You know, as the smallest member of the catechism class replied to the question: 'What is the chief end of woman?' 'Marriage!' And 'tis, too," concluded the positive Agnes.
"Do talk sensibly. But to return. Cecile and her brother visiting us is really the first time we'll have entertained guests – save Mrs. Treble and – "
"Oh, Mrs. Trouble and Double Trouble, or Barnabetta Scruggs and her father, don't count," Agnes hastened to say. "They were only people we took in. But the Shepards are real guests. And I'm so glad you decided upon giving them two of the big front rooms, Ruthie. Those guest rooms that Uncle Peter had shut up for so many years are just beautiful. There aren't such great rooms, or such splendid old furniture in Milton, as we have."
"We have much to be thankful for," said Ruth placidly.
"We've a lot to be proud of," amended Agnes. "And our auto! My! Think of us poor little miserable Kenways cutting such a dash."
"And yet you were just now longing for more nice things," pointed out Ruth.
"That's my fatal ambition," sighed her sister. "I am a female – No! A feline– as Tess says – Napoleon. I long for more worlds to conquer like Alexander. I dream of great things like Sir Humphrey Davy and Newton. I – "
"Do be feminine in your comparisons, if not feline," suggested Ruth, laughing. "Speak of great women, not of great men."
"Oh, indeed! Why, pray? Boadicea? Queen Elizabeth? Joan of Arc – "
"Oh I know who she was," declared Dot, who had been listening, open-eyed and open-mouthed, to this harangue of the volatile sister. "She was Noah's wife – and he built a big boat, and put horses and bears and pigs and goats on it so they wouldn't be drowned – and dogs and cats. And they were fruitful and multiplied and filled the earth – "
"Oh, oh, oh!" shrieked Agnes. "That child will be the death of me! Where does she pick up her knowledge of scriptural history?"
"I guess," said Ruth, kissing the pouting lips of Dot, who did not always take kindly to being laughed at, "that our old Sandyface must have been one of those cats Noah had. She has found four more little blind kittens somewhere. And what we shall do about it, I do not know."
Dot and Tess ran squealing to the shed to see the new members of the Corner House family, while Neale said, chuckling:
"It's a regular catastrophe, isn't it? Better fill the motor car with feline creatures and let Aggie and me chase around through the country, dropping cats at farmers' barns."
"Never!" proclaimed Agnes. "We mean to keep on good terms with all the farmers about Milton. We can't have them coming out and stopping us when we go by and demanding pay for all the hens you run over, Neale O'Neil."
"Never yet ran over but one hen," declared the boy quickly. "And she was an old cluck hen – the farmer said so. He thought he really ought to pay me for killing her. And she made soup at that."
"Come, come, come, children!" admonished Ruth. "Let us get out the books and see if we have quite forgotten everything we ever knew."
They gathered around the sitting-room lamp, Sammy Pinkney having appeared. Mrs. MacCall joined them with her mending, as she loved to do in the evenings. And the Corner House study hour was inaugurated for the fall with appropriate ceremonies of baked apples on the stove and a heaping plate of popcorn in the middle of the table.
"I can study so much better when I'm chewing something," Agnes admitted.
Dot was soon nodding and Mrs. MacCall from her low rocking chair observed:
"I think little folks had better go to bed with the chickens – eh, my lassie!"
"No, Mrs. Mac; I don't want to," complained the sleepy Dot. "I've got a bed of my own."
"I'll go with her," said Tess, knowing that her little sister did not like to retire alone, even if she might object to the company of chickens.
Really, none of them studied much on this evening; but they had a happy time. All, possibly, save Sammy. The thought of going to school once again made that embryo pirate very despondent.
"'Tain't that I wouldn't like to go with the fellers, and play at recess, and hear the organ play in the big hall, and spin tops on the basement play-room floor, and all that," grumbled Sammy. "But they do try to learn us such perfectly silly things."
"What silly things?" demanded Agnes with amusement.
"Why, all 'bout 'rithmetic. Huh! Can't a feller count on his fingers? What were they given us for, I'd like to know?" demanded this youthful philosopher.
"Ow! ow!" murmured Neale, vastly amused.
"Huh!" went on Sammy. "Last teacher I had – mine and Tessie's – was all the time learning us maxims, and what things meant; like love, and charity and happiness. She was so silly, she was!
"That Iky Goronofsky is the thick one," added Sammy, with a grin of recollection. "When she was trying to make us kids understand the difference between the meaning of those three words he couldn't get it into his head. So she gave him three buttons, one for love, one for charity and one for happiness, and made him take 'em home to study."
"What did he do with them!"