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The Motor Girls on the Coast: or, The Waif From the Sea
The Motor Girls on the Coast; or, The Waif From the Sea
CHAPTER I
A FLASH OF FIRE
Filled was the room with boys and girls–yes, literally filled; for they moved about so from chair to chair, from divan to sofa, from one side of the apartment to the other, now and then changing corners after the manner of the old-fashioned game of “puss,” that what they lacked in numbers they more than made up in activity. It was a veritable moving picture of healthful, happy young persons. And the talk – !
Questions and answers flew back and forth like tennis balls in a set of doubles. Repartee mingled with delicate sarcasm, and new, and almost indefinable shades of meaning were given to old and trite expressions.
“You can depend upon it, Sis!” drawled Jack Kimball as he stretched out his foot to see how far he could reach on the Persian rug without falling off his chair; “you can depend upon it that Belle will shy at the last moment. She’s afraid of water, the plain, common or garden variety of water. And when it comes to ripples, to say nothing of waves, she – ”
“Cora, can’t you make him behave?” demanded the plump Belle in question.
“Belle’s too–er–too–tired to get up and do it herself,” scoffed Ed Foster. “May I oblige you, Belle, and tweak his nose for him?”
“Come and try it!” challenged Jack.
“Let Walter do it,” advised Bess, who, the very opposite type of her sister Belle, tall and willowy–æsthetic in a word–walked to another divan over which she proceeded to “drape herself,” as Cora expressed it.
“Well, let’s hear what Jack has to say,” proposed Walter Pennington, bringing his head of crisp brown hair a little closer to the chestnut one of Bess. “He has made a statement, and it is now–will you permit me to say it–it is now strictly up to him to prove it. Say on, rash youth, and let us hear why it is that Belle will shy at the water.”
“It’s a riddle, perhaps,” suggested Eline Carleton, a visitor from Chicago. “I love to guess riddles! Say it again, Jack, do!”
“Why is a raindrop – ” began Norton Randolf, a newcomer in Chelton. “The answer is – ”