"I think not, my cousin. But no matter, if it is only one plate, for there are a good many, as you saw. Only, do be careful when you go home, that's a good boy."
"Why--you cook it with brown sugar, you know."
"Oh, dear! the masculine mind is _so_ obtuse--peaches, O sacred bird of Juno!"
"The goose. You really _must_ study mythology, Jack. You cook the peaches with brown sugar, and then you rub them through a sieve,--it's a horrid piece of work!--and then spread them on plates, just as you saw them, and cover them to keep the flies off."
"And leave long ends trailing to trip up your visitors."
"One doesn't expect giraffes to make morning calls. So after a few days it hardens, if it has the luck to be left alone, and then you roll it up."
"Of course! and sprinkle sugar over it, and it is really delicious. I might have given you that plate you knocked over, but now--"
"And, Jack, I made it all myself. No one else touched it. And all this marmalade, and three dozen pots of currant jelly, and four dozen of crab-apple."
"Sacred bird of Juno!" ejaculated her cousin.
"She drove peacocks, didn't she? I do know a _little_ mythology.
"But, Hildegarde, be serious now, will you? I'm in a peck of trouble, as Biddy says. I want consolation, or advice, or something."
"Sit down, and tell me," said Hildegarde, full of interest at once.
Jack sat down and drummed on the table, a thing that Hildegarde had never been allowed to do.
"I got a letter from Daddy, yesterday," he said, after a pause. "Herr Geigen is going to Germany now, in a week, and Daddy says I may go if Uncle Tom is willing."
"And he isn't willing?" Hilda said. "Oh!"
Jack got up and moved restlessly about the room, laying waste the chairs as he went. "Willing? He only roars, and says, 'Stuff and nonsense!' which is no answer, you know, Hilda. If he would just say 'No,' quietly, I--well, of course you can make up your mind to stand a thing, and stand it. But he won't listen to me for five minutes. If he could realise--one can get as good an education at Leipsic as at Harvard. But his idea of Germany is a country inhabited by a crazy emperor and a 'parcel of Dutch fiddlers,' and by no one else. I shall have to give it up, I suppose."
"Oh, no!" cried Hildegarde hopefully. "Don't give it up yet. You know when mamma spoke to him, he didn't absolutely say 'No.' He said he would think about it. Perhaps--she might ask him if he had thought about it. Wait a day or two, at any rate, Jack, before you write to your father. Can you wait?"