"The poor little thing will probably be so frightened and homesick by the time David gets her here, that she won't know what kind of a place she's arrived at," Gertrude suggested. "Oh, I wouldn't be in your shoes for the next few days for anything in the world, Beulah Page; would you, Margaret?" The third girl in the group smiled. "I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "It would be rather fun to begin it." "I'd rather have her for the first two months, and get it over with," Beulah said decisively. "It'll be hanging over your head long after my ordeal is over, and by the time I have to have her again she'll be absolutely in training. You don't come until the fifth on the list you know, Gertrude. Jimmie has her after me, then Margaret, then Peter, and you, and David, if he has got up the courage to tell his mother by that time." "But if he hasn't," Gertrude suggested. "He can work it out for himself. He's got to take the child two months like the rest of us. He's agreed to." "He will," Margaret said, "I've never known him to go back on his word yet." "Trust Margaret to stick up for David. Anyway, I've taken the precaution to put it in writing, as you know, and the document is filed." "We're not adopting this infant legally." "No, Gertrude, we can't,--yet, but morally we are. She isn't an infant, she's ten years old. I wish you girls would take the matter a little more seriously. We've bound ourselves to be responsible for this child's whole future. We have undertaken her moral, social and religious education. Her body and soul are to be--" "Equally divided among us," Gertrude cut in. Beulah scorned the interruption. "--held sacredly in trust by the six of us, severally and collectively." "Why haven't we adopted her legally then?" Margaret asked. "Well, you see, there are practical objections. You have to be a corporation or an institution or something, to adopt a child as a group. A child can't have three sets of parents in the eyes of the law, especially when none of them is married, or have the least intention of being married, to each other.--I don't see what you want to keep laughing at, Gertrude. It's all a little unusual and modern and that sort of thing, but I don't think it's funny. Do you, Margaret?" "I think that it's funny, but I think that it's serious, too, Beulah." "I don't see what's funny about--" Beulah began hotly. "You don't see what's funny about anything,--even Rogers College, do you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and spiritually responsible for it. It's a lot more than funny, I know, but it doesn't seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until somebody was willing to admit what a _scream_ the whole thing is." "We'll admit that, if that's all you want, won't we, Beulah?" Margaret appealed.