Eunice and Cricket by Elizabeth Weston Timlow - HTML preview

 CHAPTER XXI.
 BREAKING UP.

The June days had come again, and the children were beginning to look forward to the summer exodus to Kayuna. Their school closed the second week in June, and the flitting was to take place on the 11th. Eunice and Cricket were to go to Marbury in July for a two weeks’ visit to their grandmother. The Somers family were to be there, as usual, and Edna had written imploring letters that the girls might be with her there for a little while. Then Edna was to be with them in Kayuna the entire month of August.

“Doesn’t it seem six years since last June, when we were all flying around, and mamma was getting ready to go to Europe?” said Cricket on the last night at the house in town. “Seems to me I was such a little girl then.”

Indeed, Cricket, as well as Eunice, had grown much older in the last year, and was more responsible and self-reliant in every way. Both girls had grown tall, Cricket especially, for she had shot up within half an inch of Eunice this winter.

Cricket was very proud of this, and was hugely delighted when people took her to be Eunice’s twin, as they quite often had of late. But her curly hair was getting to be a great grievance, as it still tumbled about her shoulders, and wouldn’t grow long.

“Do you suppose my hair will always stay short and curly?” she asked, anxiously. She was sitting perched on her father’s knee. The younger children were in bed, and the others were all in the back parlour. The furniture was in its summer dress of brown holland, the pictures had retired behind mosquito nets, and everything wore a shut-up-for-the-summer expression, except the family.

“Just think how I’ll look when I’m eighty,” went on Cricket, in an aggrieved tone, “going about with little flippy-floppy curls all over my head, like old Mrs. Crazy-Beecher, round on Jones Street. Don’t you know how her curls always jiggle up and down, because she nods all the time like a Chinese mandolin?”

“Mandarin, dear. Yes. You might wear a wig then,” suggested mamma.

“Ugh! I’d hate to wear store hair.”

“Did you hear Kenneth’s latest? He watched Eliza this morning putting on that funny jute braid she wears, and it seemed to strike him for the first time, so he said, ‘’Liza, what makes you wear cloth hair? Mamma doesn’t.’”

“I don’t want cloth hair, either,” said Cricket, decidedly. “Papa, can’t anything be done to straighten my curls out? Couldn’t you give me some medicine for it? I’d like to put it up in plaster of Paris. Wouldn’t that do it? It straightened out the little Smith boy’s leg.”

“We might put your mind up in plaster of Paris, to take some of the kinks out of that,” observed Donald.

“My mind’s the best I’ve got, and you’ll please be respectful to it,” said Cricket, with dignity. “You’re a model of sarcasticity, I suppose you think. Anyway, I do wish I had ‘plain hair,’ as Zaidie says. Eunice just gives hers a good brushing in the morning, and braids it up all smooth and nice, and there it stays. While mine!”—a gesture of despair finished the sentence.

“I don’t know what I can do for you, little Gloriana McQuirk,” said her father, tumbling the obnoxious curls affectionately over her face.

“There!” exclaimed Cricket. “Nobody would ever think of throwing Eunice’s braid over her face, and it wouldn’t disturb it a bit if they did, and nobody minds tossing mine every which way, as if I hadn’t a feeling to my name.”

“Cricket’s trials with her hair are like Amy March’s with her nose,” said Marjorie.

“Good idea,” said Donald. “Braid your hair into pig-tails, and put a patent clothes-pin at the end of each one, Miss Scricket,” and only the fact that none were to be found in the kitchen regions, whither Cricket instantly repaired, prevented the suggestion from being carried out.

“How different things will be when we come back next fall,” Mrs. Ward said, presently, when Cricket had resumed her place on her father’s knee. “It will seem strange to have Marjorie gone, and the little ones in school.”

For the next year was to see several changes. For one thing, Marjorie was to go to boarding-school for a year. She would soon be seventeen, and her father and mother wished her to have the training in self-reliance and independence that a year away would give her. Marjorie did not aspire to college life, but was eager to cultivate her musical talent especially. Later, she was to have a year in Germany for that purpose.

Eunice and Cricket were to be collegians, however, and were already planning with regard to Wellesley days.

Next year, also, the twins were to be launched on their school career. They had never been even to a kindergarten, for Helen had been too delicate, and Mrs. Ward did not wish to separate the children. Now Helen seemed to be growing stronger all the time, and Doctor Ward thought that school would be quite feasible the next fall. Even Kenneth was to begin at the kindergarten, and it was no wonder that Mrs. Ward, as she said, began to feel that she really had a grown-up family.

The girls would miss Marjorie immensely next year, but, by way of compensation, Eunice thought she would enjoy the dignity of being the oldest daughter at home.

“And I think people really ought to begin to call me Miss Ward,” she said, meditatively.

THE END.