Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> Then let you reach your hat</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> and go.</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> As usual, let you—also</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> walking down—exclaim</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> to twelve upward leaving</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> a subscription praise</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> for what time slays.</span>
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<p>“what do you want? getting weak on the links?<br />
fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS<br />
FOURTEENTH? it’s half past six she said—if<br />
you don’t like my gate why did you<br />
swing on it, why <i>didja</i><br />
swing on it<br />
anyhow—”
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<p>O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,<br />
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;<br />
Condensed, thou takest all—shrill ganglia<br />
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.<br />
And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,<br />
The sod and billow breaking,—lifting ground,<br />
—A sound of waters bending astride the sky<br />
Unceasing with some Word that will not die...!
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> And somehow anyhow swing—</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 11em;"> <i>To Find the Western path</i></span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 11em;"> <i>Right thro' the Gates of Wrath</i></span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 20em;"> <i>—Blake</i></span>
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<p>For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street.<br />
The platform hurries along to a dead stop.
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<p>And why do I often meet your visage here,<br />
Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on<br />
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?<br />
—And did their riding eyes right through your side,<br />
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?<br />
And Death, aloft,—gigantically down<br />
Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!<br />
And when they dragged your retching flesh,<br />
Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore—<br />
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you<br />
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
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<p>Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.<br />
This answer lives like verdigris, like hair<br />
Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;<br />
And repetition freezes—“What
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<p>“Of course you know our family are all in modest circumstances, but it seems that there is this one wealthy relative—an elderly, maiden aunt on my father’s side. I have never seen her, because she has lived in California during all of my life, but naturally I had heard of her before. She never took any interest in us, however, and always said she was going to leave all of her money to her two nephews whom she is raising.<br />
“Well, I hardly thought she knew of my existence, when suddenly, out of a clear sky, I got this letter from her with its thrilling proposition. She must have learned somewhere of the work we did last summer, and of our reason for doing it, and she was impressed. She evidently never knew any Girl Scouts before, or in fact any girls who were interested in anything so worth while as a sick mother or a tea-house. So, lo and behold, she writes to me and tells me she wants to make my acquaintance—and not only mine, but that of the whole patrol!”<br />
“But we can’t go out west, Alice!” interrupted Marjorie, jumping at her meaning. “We couldn’t possibly afford it.”<br />
“No,” added Florence, “I was thinking of looking for a job for the summer.”<br />
“Wait till you hear the rest of it!” said Alice. “We won’t need any money. Aunt Emeline is offering to pay all our expenses, <i>if we motor to California</i>!”<br />
“Motor!” repeated Marjorie. “We girls? By ourselves—?”
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<p>“We’re all here!” she cried, joyfully. “Together now—and together all summer! Isn’t it marvelous?”<br />
“Yes, if only Mae were here,” said Lily, who never could forget the absent members.<br />
“And if Doris and I could go with you,” sighed Marie Louise.<br />
“You can’t go?” asked Alice, her face clouding. “Oh, why not, Marie Louise? Are you going to get married too?”<br />
“No, indeed,” replied the other girl, laughingly. “But I am keeping on at art school this summer.”<br />
“What a shame!” cried several of the others at once. They were all genuinely fond of this girl who was the latest addition to their number.<br />
Without even removing their hats, the girls all dropped into chairs in the living-room and continued to talk fast and furiously about their proposed trip. It seemed that all of the college girls were planning to go; and Marjorie’s announcement of Mrs. Remington’s acceptance added another cause for rejoicing. Their only regret was that their two hostesses and Mae Melville could not go.<br />
“I honestly feel sorry for you married people!” teased Florence. “To think that you have to miss all the fun—”<br />
“But there are compensations,” Doris reminded her. “Maybe we feel sorry for you!”<br />
“Now Doris, we won’t stand for that!” retorted Alice. “And anyhow—”<br />
“Anyhow what?” demanded the other, as Alice paused in the middle of her remark.<br />
“Anyhow some of us may have gone over to your side by the time we come back. I expect some of the girls to fall for my cousins—”<br />
But Marjorie put an end to their bantering by a call to the practical.
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<p>She led the way up the mahogany and white staircase to the dainty little guest room at the rear of the second story, a boudoir such as any girl would love, furnished in cream-colored painted furniture, with pink floral decorations and pink and cream curtains at the windows. Ethel admired it profusely.<br />
“And did you work that bed-spread yourself?” she asked, examining closely the applique work in a flower design, upon unbleached muslin. “It’s simply too pretty to sleep on.”<br />
“Oh, it will wash!” laughed Doris. “Yes, I did make it myself. I love to do fancy-work.” Then, in the same breath, “Now tell us all about the trip. I’m tremendously interested.”<br />
“I’m afraid I don’t know a whole lot myself—just the bare facts that you know. But wait till Marj and Alice get here—they’ll tell us everything. By the way, is everybody coming?”<br />
“Everybody but Mae,” replied Doris. “You could hardly expect so recent a bride. In fact,” she added, “I didn’t even invite her. I knew it would be of no use.”<br />
“And she’s too far away-way out there in Ohio,” said Ethel. “I’m afraid we won’t see much of her any more.”<br />
They descended the staircase just in time to see, through the glass door, a taxi stop in front of the house. A moment later five merry, laughing girls jumped out of the machine and skipped up the porch steps. Marjorie Wilkinson, the last to enter the house on account of the delay in paying the driver, decided to make up for lost time, and seized Ethel, Doris, and Marie Louise all at once in one inclusive hug.
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<p>“No; we may, in fact, we <i>must</i> have a chaperone.”<br />
“It would be a wonderful thing to do!” exclaimed Florence, contrasting the pleasures of such a delightful excursion with the routine duties of an office position, such as she had planned for herself. “But is it possible?”<br />
“Why not?” demanded Alice. “Lots of girls have done it before—I’ve even read accounts of their trips in the magazines, telling all about what to take, and how much it costs.”<br />
“But they are always older girls than we are!” objected Lily.<br />
“Girl Scouts can do anything any other girls can do!” asserted Marjorie with pride. “I’m sure we could make the trip. Now, tell me again, please, Alice: just which of us are invited?”<br />
“All the girls who took part in last summer’s work at the tea-house,” replied Alice. “That means us four, Daisy Gravers, Ethel Todd, Marie Louise Harris—and—Doris and Mae if they want to.”<br />
“‘If they want to’ is good!” laughed Marjorie. “Imagine those two brides leaving their husbands for a two months’ trip!”<br />
“Of course you could hardly expect Mae to,” admitted Alice; “she’s quite too recent a bride. But Doris will have been married a year.”<br />
“But she and Roger are just as spoony as ever!” interrupted Lily. “No, I’m afraid we can’t count on them. But the other three girls probably will.”
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<p>Two weeks after Alice Endicott had received her startling invitation to visit her aunt at the latter’s expense, Doris Harris sat in the living-room of her cozy little Philadelphia house, awaiting the arrival of all the girls concerned. The party was to be a week-end one, half of the girls staying at her house, and half at the home of her sister-in-law, Marie Louise Harris, with whom they had lived during the preceding summer while conducting the tea-room.<br />
Doris looked about the attractively furnished room, with its shining white paint and snowy curtains, its delft blue hangings and upholstery, and smiled contentedly to herself. It would have been pleasant, she thought, to go to college, along with the majority of the girls of the senior patrol; but it could not have been nearly so wonderful as to be married to the best man in the world, and to possess such a dear little home of her own. And, after all, there would always be occasions like this when she could manage to be with the girls again.<br />
She heard a light step on the porch but she did not put down her fancy work to go to the door, for she recognized it as belonging to her sister-in-law. The girls were so intimate that neither considered stopping to ring the bell at the other’s home. A moment later Marie Louise opened the door.
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<p>But at last the college term neared its close, and the scouts began to make definite preparations for their excursion. Marjorie selected her committee and planned to buy the equipment in Philadelphia, a week or so before the time to start.<br />
She had commissioned John Hadley to order the other automobile—a seven passenger touring car—and had thereby won an invitation for herself and Alice and Lily (the other two members of her committee) to stay with Mrs. Hadley while they were in Philadelphia. Recalling the pleasure and the convenience of a similar visit the preceding summer, when she was buying equipment for the tea-room, she accepted the invitation gratefully for herself and her companions.<br />
“I’m so glad I’m a member of this committee,” remarked Lily as their train pulled into Philadelphia; “so that we will have this week together. For I think it is going to be lots of fun.”<br />
“If it’s anything like last year it will,” returned Marjorie.<br />
“Ah, but remember that we had the boys then to make things lively,” observed Alice.<br />
“Well, we have them now. Aren’t we staying at John’s home—and isn’t my brother Jack working right here in Philadelphia—and ready to help us at any minute? And—” Marjorie glanced slyly at Lily—“I dare say Lil might be able to locate Dick Roberts if we needed him!”<br />
“It’s time to get our gloves on!” was all the reply her jest drew from Lily. “We’re slowing up already.”´
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<p>“We’ll need several cars,” concluded Lily, who always did things sumptuously.<br />
“Two ought to be enough,” said Florence. “But say, girls, why couldn’t we leave our planning until Doris’s house-party? Then we’ll all be together, and will know definitely whether or not we can go.”<br />
“But the boys will be such an interruption!” sighed Lily. “You can’t get a thing done with them around.”<br />
“Oh, we’ll shut them out of our conferences,” announced Marjorie, coolly. “We must accustom ourselves to getting along without the opposite sex if we are to make a success of our trip.”<br />
“And yet it is a pity,” remarked Alice, “after all they did for us last summer at the tea-house!”<br />
“Yes, maybe if it weren’t for them we wouldn’t have become famous and received this scrumptious invitation,” surmised Daisy.
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<p>“Girls!” she flung out. “Guess what?”<br />
“What?” they all demanded at once.<br />
Alice waved an open letter before their eyes.<br />
“The most magnificent thing has happened—”<br />
“To you?” interrupted Florence, who always wanted to be explicit.<br />
“To <i>us</i>—all of us—of the senior patrol. A plan for this summer!”<br />
“The scouts aren’t to get together again, are they?” cried Marjorie, jumping up and going over towards Alice, as if she wanted at a single glance to learn the contents of that mysterious letter.<br />
“Have you found a baby, or only a boot-legger?” asked Lily, laughingly. “Because it’s too late to get our tea-house back again, after the money’s all spent!”<br />
“Neither of those things,” replied Alice. “Only a rich relation.”<br />
“Why the ‘only’?” inquired Florence. “I think that’s almost enough. But tell us about it. How does it concern us?”<br />
“Just wait till you hear!” laughed Alice, turning to her letter again.<br />
“Well, do let us hear!” begged Lily, impatiently. “We’re waiting.”<br />
Alice seated herself upon the couch and paused a moment before she started upon her explanation, as if to make the situation more dramatic. At last she began.
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<p>If talking about the summer’s excursion could have hastened the date of the event, the weeks would have passed in rapid succession, for the Girl Scouts never grew tired of discussing its every aspect. Whenever two or three of them were together the conversation drifted inevitably to this one all important topic; at other times, when lessons were put aside for the evening or a Sunday afternoon offered an opportunity for rest, the five scouts would gather together in Marjorie’s sitting-room to talk of their plans. Sometimes they would discuss the country through which they were to motor, and read descriptions from books about the scenery; at other times they would be concerned with the actual problems of the trip; but invariably they would end up with the contemplation of their reward, giving expression to their dreams of owning motor-cars of their own. To the poorer girls the idea was too entrancing ever to lose its novelty; Florence and Daisy would talk for hours of the trips they meant to take, the people they would invite to go riding with them, the pleasure and the service they intended to give. Had it not been for these hours of happy anticipation the time would have seemed to pass slowly; all of the girls—even Marjorie, who was usually too busy to be bored—grew impatient of the months that intervened.
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<p>Marjorie blushed, remembering the time she had told John Hadley that she would spend her vacation with him and his mother, and had disappointed him to go on the ranch. Luckily, however, no definite plans had been agreed upon as yet for this summer.<br />
“No, thank goodness I didn’t promise,” she replied. “But,” she added teasingly, “how can you ever exist all that time without seeing Dick Roberts?”<br />
Her room-mate only laughed good-naturedly at the thrust; she was used to being taunted about the frequency of this young man’s visits.<br />
“I can get along very well without any young man,” she replied, boastfully. “I’m not Doris—or Mae Van Horn!”<br />
“Mae Melville, you mean,” corrected Alice, for they all had difficulty in calling the girl by her new name, of which she had been in possession only a month. “Wasn’t it funny,” she added, “that Mae caught Doris’s bouquet at the wedding, and sure enough was the first to get married! Just as if there were something to the old superstition after all!”<br />
“It was, and it wasn’t, odd,” reasoned Marjorie; “because after all it was very natural for Doris and Mae to be the first girls married from our patrol. They didn’t have so much to keep them occupied as we college girls have—and they had more time to think about such things.”<br />
“Implying,” remarked Florence, “that if you weren’t busy here, you’d be marrying John Hadley, and Lily, Dick Roberts, and—”<br />
“That will do, Flos!” remonstrated Marjorie. “You don’t have to apply every generalization personally. But, seriously, it is a fact that college girls usually marry later in life than those who just stay at home like Doris.”<br />
“But Mae didn’t stay home! She had a job.”
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<p>But if Doris thought that the presence of the boys at dinner that evening would put a damper upon the discussion of the project, she was mistaken. The boys, among whom were Jack Wilkinson, John Hadley, and Dick Roberts—all intimate friends of the girls—already knew something of the plans and showed their interest by a succession of questions. John and Dick both looked anything but pleased.<br />
“Why couldn’t you do something in Philadelphia?” asked Dick, sulkily. “We had such a bully time last summer!”<br />
“Why don’t you take a motor trip to the coast?” returned Florence. “Last year we came to you—this year you come with us! Turn about is fair play!”<br />
“Don’t suggest it!” protested Alice, alarmed at the very mention of such a thing. “We’d never earn our cars with the boys following in our trail.”<br />
“People!” exclaimed Marjorie, suddenly struck by an inspiration. “I know something fine! It has just occurred to me that Mae lives in a town on the Lincoln Highway—the way we will undoubtedly go to the coast. And she has urged us all to visit her—so couldn’t we stop on our way out, and maybe you boys join us for a week-end?”<br />
“Where does she live?” asked Jack, doubtfully. He was not sure of being able to get away from the office whenever he desired.<br />
“Lima—in Ohio,” replied Doris. “It isn’t awfully far.”<br />
“But would it be right for a big crowd like this to descend upon her all at once?” inquired Daisy.<br />
“Mae wouldn’t mind,” Doris hastened to assure her. “You know she has a rather large house—and two servants—for Tom Melville has plenty of this world’s goods. In fact, I think she may be a little lonely, and would be overjoyed to see you.”<br />
“Then that settles it!” cried Marjorie. “I’ll write tomorrow and invite ourselves.”<br />
“But how do you know when to set the date for?” asked Florence.<br />
“We’ll have to work it all out by mathematics,” replied the latter. “There’s a lot of planning to be done, and equipment to be bought. We’ll have to name a committee.”<br />
“I propose you as chairman,” said Lily, immediately. “Because you’re our lieutenant—and you can pick your own committee.”<br />
“I second that motion!” exclaimed Ethel.
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<p>“I think it’s more fun to camp, anyhow,” said Marjorie. “Imagine Girl Scouts running to hotels all along the way! Though it will be nice to stop every once in a while and get a real bath!”<br />
“Oh, you’ll have to go to a hotel in the big cities,” put in Doris, who took as much interest in the affair as if she were going herself.<br />
“The funniest thing is going to be refusing any help from men we happen to meet along the road,” remarked Daisy. “I’m afraid some of them may think we’re terribly rude.”<br />
“And suppose we get in such a tight place we simply can’t get out,” suggested Ethel. “What are we to do?”<br />
“Walk miles to a garage, or trust to some women tourists to give us a lift,” answered Marjorie, firmly.<br />
“Trust us! Girl Scouts don’t give up easily.”<br />
“But remember,” put in Daisy, who was still a little dubious as to the success of the undertaking, “that we always had our own Boy Scouts to help us before. And now we’ll be miles away!” she sighed regretfully.<br />
“We wouldn’t call on them if they were right behind us!” asserted Marjorie. “Oh, it’s going to be great fun—so much more than if we were all wealthy, and could just take the trip as we pleased, without any terms being dictated! It means that we’ve got one more chance to show what Girl Scouts can do!”
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