ared again."

"But I shan't win it. I'll lose my breath like I always do. And
Clara's so fat. She just has to float."

"Maybe if she was sick--if she eats something--"

"She can't. Prissy's got her on a diet. She's Prissy's pet."

Pip-Emma put her arm over Janet's shoulder. It was an accolade, and
Janet knew it.

"Gee--you poor kid!" Pip-Emma said, and relapsed into deep thought
again.

The two wandered off the landing stage together. Outside the gameroom
Claudine was writing up a notice on the blackboard. The twins went to
a progressive school where you learned spelling only if you felt the
urge. The twins had never felt it.

"You don't spell Saturday with an 'a' in the middle," Pip-Emma said.

A hot and flustered twin rubbed out the word with a lofty air of
apprehended carelessness, and Pip-Emma wrote it in for her.

"If I spelled like you do," she said, "old Perks would give me hell."

* * * * *

The harassed Penguins pinned one of their last hopes on horses. It
seemed probable that if Pip-Emma had never seen any trees, she had
never seen horses, either--or only from a distance--and that she would
be impressed. But it turned out that Pip-Emma's uncle had a horse--not
the W.P.A. uncle but the mounted-cop uncle--and that it was a bigger
and better horse than anything in the Camp stables. Pip-Emma had
actually ridden it from Ninth to Tenth Avenue. Moreover her uncle had
chased Squint-Eyed Peters down Forty-fifth Street and shot him and his
armored car so full of holes that it was hardly worth while cleaning
them up. Pip-Emma told the story after taps and in such gory detail
that the Penguins didn't know or care that discipline was going to the
dogs.

They learned at the same time that Mr. Binns, in his unregenerate
youth, had been an Englishman and had fought in the Great War and that
Emma's name was Pip because in English soldier language Pip-Emma meant
anything that happened after midday. And Emma had happened in Hell's
Kitchen at 3:30.

The Penguins sat up in their beds and listened spellbound. The glamour
surrounding Wall Street, Big Business, and the kind but stoutish and
baldish gentlemen who were their fathers was suffering an acute
depression. The prospect of their fathers' appearance on Saturday and
of Pip-Emma's dispassionate appraisal filled the Penguins with
uneasiness.

Things had come to such a pass that when on Friday evening, after the
Camp singsong, Clara felt Emma's arm slip through