and she would have refused on the spot

Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowedher. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest andyoungest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. Butthere was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had drivenher and Nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at theFulmers' and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom shehad kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule thisuproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying tobeguile Clarissa Vanderlyn's ladylike leisure; and she would have refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if theonly possible alternatives had not come to seem so much less bearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standingthere, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quietgrown-up voice: "Oh, yes, I'm sure Mrs. Lansing and I canmanage while you're away--especially if she reads aloud well."Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She hadnever before known children who cared to be read aloud to; sheremembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa inanything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which thechild had said, showing Strefford's trinket to her father: 　　"Because I said I'd rather have it than a book."And here were children who consented to be left for three monthsby their parents, but on condition that a good reader wasprovided for them! 　　"Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read toyou?" she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, afterone of her sober pauses of reflection: "The little ones likenearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly,because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce thepuzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.""Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right," Susy murmured,stricken with self-distrust and humility. 　　Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even thetwins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed toprefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from theMidsummer Night's Dream, to their own more specializedliterature, though that had also at times to be provided.