“He only wanted to know about an express bundle; whether it was hefty or light, and where it came from and if we expected it,” Jean replied, piling the mail on the dining-room table. “There is no mail from Saskatoon, sister fair.” “Well, I only wanted to hear from Honey. He promised me a silver fox skin for Christmas if he could find one.” Kit’s face was perfectly serious. Honey had asked her before he left Gilead Center just what she would like best, and, truthful as always, Kit had told him a silver fox skin. The other girls had nicknamed it “The Quest of the Silver Fox,” and called Honey a new Jason, but Kit still held firmly to the idea that if there was any such animal floating around, Honey would get it for her. Jean was engrossed in a five-page letter from one of the girl students at the Academy back in New York where she had studied the previous winter. The sunlight poured through the big semicircular bay window at the south end of the dining-room. Here Doris and Helen maintained the plant stand, a sort of half-moon pyramid, home-made, with rows of potted ferns, geraniums, and begonias on its steps. Helen had fashioned some window boxes too, covered with birchbark and lined with moss, trying to coax some adder’s tongue and trailing ground myrtle, with even some wild miniature pines, like Japanese dwarfs, to stay green. “It has turned bleak and barren out of doors so suddenly,” said Helen. “One day it was all beautiful yellow and russet and even old rose, but the next, after that heavy frost, it was all dead. I’m glad pines don’t mind frost and cold.” “Pines are the most optimistic, dearest trees of all,” Kit agreed, opening up an early spring catalogue. “If it wasn’t for the pines and these catalogues to encourage one, I’d want to hunt a woodchuck hole and hiberate.” “Hibernate,” Jean corrected absently. Now, one active principle in the Robbins family was interest in each other’s affairs. It was called by various names. Doris said it was “nosing.” Helen called it “petty curiosity.” But Kit came out flatly and said it was based primarily on inherent family affection; that necessarily every twig of a family tree must be intensely and vitally interested in every single thing that affected any sister twig. Accordingly, she deserted her catalogues with their enticing pictures of flowering bulbs, and, leaning over Jean’s chair, demanded to know the cause of her absorption. “Bab Crane is taking up expression.” Jean turned back to the first page of the letter she had been reading. “She says she never fully realized before that art is only the highest form of expressing your ideals to the world at large.” “Tell her she’s all wrong.” Kit shook her mop of boyish curls decidedly. “Cousin Roxy told me the other day she believes schools were first invented for the relief of distressed parents just to give them a breathing spell, and not for children at all.”