ntil 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.

"If I've got this insatiable sense of humor, let's indulge it by all
means," Gertrude laughed. "Go on, chillun, go on, I'll try to be good
now."

"I wish you would," Margaret said. "Confine yourself to a syncopat