Peggy Parsons at Prep School

“Excerpt: ...with scant sympathy, but with much merry appreciation of her snow-powdered face and its look of wondering appeal. Nevertheless, in spite of difficulties and delays, they had covered two meadows and a large open field without more stress of adventure than they found pleasant. All of a sudden Peggy pointed ahead. There, gleaming on before them, straight ahead and over the crest of a bit of rising ground, were the glistening snow-shoe marks of another explorer who had recently gone that way before them. The sun shone into the criss-cross pattern of the steps, which seemed to the girls to be both invitation and challenge. Katherine adapted the quotation, laughing. \"If I could leave behind me any such even tracks as that it might be worth while going on, but when you can't get the swing of it, Peggy, you can't keep warm, and while I want to learn, sometime, I think it wasn't born in me as it was in you, and it will need several practice attempts before I can be in your class at all. So I'm going back-for now-do you want to come, or are you going on-?\" Peggy looked back toward the familiar roofs of Andrews, and then she looked away out over the barren fields in their whiteness, new and untouched save for the gleaming snow-shoe tracks that called and called to her to be as adventurous as they. \"I guess I'll go on,\" she said, a hint of abandon in her voice. \"Well, good-by, hon,\" said Katherine, meekly taking her leave. \"I will get about as much more of this as I want going back, but I hope you have a nice time-and-and end up at tea somewhere just as we were going to.\" \"Tea by myself would be horrid,\" Peggy called after her. \"I won't be long, but I just must have some more, I love it so.\" Then she turned her face to the snow-shoe tracks, and with a little gay song on her lips took up their trail. \"I'm Robinson Crusoe,\" she told herself blithely, \"and these tracks are the good man Friday's. And we are the...”