Peggy Parsons at Prep School
stole—still I don’t see the application to this particular question,” she concluded.

“Well, there are other tales,” insisted the crestfallen Florence, and, their coffee cups in their hands, the girls gathered around to tell Peggy many harrowing incidents connected with the great house back from the river, and she heard them quietly, piercing slices of bacon with her stick the while.

“Let’s go up and cook him a dinner,” she cried, springing to her feet when they had done. “We are a cooking class, aren’t we, and that’s the best thing we do, isn’t it? And here we go on just preparing all the good things back at school for us to eat ourselves—it seems, well, piggish. Wouldn’t it be lovely to demonstrate our next lesson by bringing all the materials up to Gloomy House and cooking up a big, wonderful dinner, and having it with Mr. Huntington? We can’t give him a million dollars or anything like that, but we can make one day a lot brighter—and, besides, I can’t stand it to think of anyone hungry—will you, girls? What do you say?”

She stood before them, lifting her slim hand for the vote, her eyes shining with eagerness to put her plan at once into execution.

The other girls gasped. Peggy, although she had been with them so short a time, had won a large place in their admiration.

“He wouldn’t let us,” reminded Florence, puckering her forehead thoughtfully. “Didn’t I tell you he’d bite anybody, fairly, that dreamed of trying to offer him charity? Peggy, I believe you’re partly right, though, maybe we could do something, but it would never work that way.”

“Well,” said Peggy promptly, sitting down to think it out, “how can it be done?”

For to Peggy life presented no unsolvable problems. She never thought of cluttering her joyous way with impossibilities. Once a plan seemed good to her it was only a question of How, and not of Whether.

“We might invite a lot of people to the school,” timidly suggested one of the young cooks.

“He’d never come,” Florence shook her head.

“Well, then,” cried Peggy, “here we are! Let’s give a series of dinners—at the houses of the trustees, and the different girls in the class, just to show what we can do, and we’ll have the accounts put in the town paper, so he’ll see what we’re doing, and then—” her eyes shone and she could hardly talk fast enough to let 
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