THE BIG IDEA
The fact that the two little girls were going to the same town was the
finishing link in the chain of friendship that they had forged so
rapidly. They talked that evening about their schools, and their games,
and the books they had read until Miss Fisher and Caroline's own sense
of propriety plucked them apart. In the morning they began where they
had left off, while Miss Fisher, who was quite exhausted, after a
car-sick night, remained aloof and shook her head in utter helplessness.
Now Miss Fisher's car-sickness has a great deal to do with the story.
She was honestly feeling that she could not endure another hour in the
train, when she received a telegram at Albany. Friends of hers, whom she
had not seen in months, a nice girl and her even nicer brother (so Miss
Fisher thought), wired that they would meet her at the train in
Pittsfield and whisk her away for a blissful week-end in the Berkshires
before she went on to her aunt's house in Boston. For an instant Miss
Fisher thought of duty and the tiresome, unruly child she had agreed to
chaperon. Then she thought of the deadly hours in the train, and the
nice girl's even nicer brother.
Miss Fisher lurched out into the car and captured Jacqueline. To
Jacqueline she explained that she had to leave the train at Pittsfield,
and that Jacqueline would remain in the care of the conductor and the
porter till she reached Baring Junction, where those officials would
deliver her to her great-aunt. Jacqueline was of course to be a very
good girl.
"Sure!" promised Jacqueline--too readily, a suspicious person might have
thought.
But Miss Fisher was too fluttered with her own affairs to be suspicious.
She tripped gayly off the train at Pittsfield, into the arms of her
friends, and out of this story. Of course her conduct was quite
blameworthy, and so Jacqueline's Aunt Edie and several other people said
later. Just the same Jacqueline should not have called her a fish, and
certainly not a piece of cheese.
The moment Miss Fisher's rumpled blue linen skirt had vanished from the
car, Jacqueline laid hold of Caroline's suitcase and, like a valorous
small ant with a huge crumb, tugged it into the drawing-room. Caroline
snatched up her hat and her sweater, and with Mildred in her arms
followed after protesting.
"You come along," Jacqueline over-rode her protests. "We can sprawl all
we want to in here, and people won't stop to stare at Mildred, and ask
us our names, and do we like to travel. Wouldn't they be peeved if _we_
asked _them_ questions like that, without being introduced?"
So Caroline and Jacqueline and Mildred settled down to enjoy the privacy
and comfort of the drawing-room, without the disadvantages of Miss
Fisher's presence. But somehow they didn't enjoy themselves much. For
they couldn't forget--that is, Caroline and Jacqueline couldn't, for I
don't know about Mildred--that the pretty little gold watch on
Jacqueline's wrist, with its madly racing minute-hand, was tearing away
the hours, so very few now, before the train reached Baring Junction.
"I'm going to have a rotten summer," complained Jacqueline. "Oh, I wish
I'd made Aunt Edie let me go to a camp! Great-aunt Eunice is as old as
the hills and Cousin Penelope is most as old. It will be poky at their
house, and I can't do this, or Aunt Eunice will be scared, and I can't
do that, or Cousin Penelope will scold. Oh, shivering chimpanzees! I
wish I'd gone to camp!"
But poor little Caroline had no words for the misery that possessed her,
as the minutes ran by and the hour came nearer that should deliver her
into the hands of grudging strangers.
"I--I hope half-aunt Martha's boys aren't big," she confided to
Jacqueline. "I--I'm afraid of boys."
"I'm not," said Jacqueline. "I'd rather face fifteen boys than one old
piano."
"And I hope they don't make me pitch hay or drive cows--I'm scared of
cows," quavered Caroline.
"I'd rather drive a million cows than have to be starched up and on my
good behavior with a pack of tiresome aunts," Jacqueline returned
gloomily.
"Oh!" Caroline was goaded into crying. "If only you were me, and I were
you!"
Jacqueline snorted derision. What's the use of wishing? Then her gaze
wandered to the helter-skelter heap of her belongings on the
couch--hat-box, vanity bag, coat, suitcase, books!
Books! Her eyes fell on the gay jacket of "The Prince and the Pauper."
Suddenly she grasped Caroline's arm so hard that Caroline squeaked:
"Ow!"
"Don't stop to _ow_!" bade Jacqueline. "Because if you've got your nerve
with you, I've got the dandiest plan so you can have a piano this
summer, and no babies to tend, and no boys, nor nothing."
Caroline merely stared and held Mildred tight. She really feared that
the heat of the day had affected Jacqueline's head.
"Your bossy old half-aunt has never seen you," went on Jacqueline, "and
my Gildersleeve relations haven't seen me since I was three years old."
"Yes," nodded Caroline. That much she thought it safe to grant.
"They're each of them expecting a little girl most eleven years old,
with brown hair and eyes, and her hair bobbed."
"Yes," Caroline freely admitted.
"Well, then!" Jacqueline concluded triumphantly. "Suppose we go and
change clothes, like Prince Edward and Tom Canty in 'The Prince and the
Pauper,' and you say you're me, and I say I'm you,--and who's to know
the difference?"