“I think,” remarked Elliott, the next morning, “that I will walk up and watch the haying for a while.”

She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn’t spend six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as were this household’s members, and do nothing at all. 92 That was the disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the pans shine.

Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way through the kitchen. “What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every one of them.”

A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica’s praise made them doubly so.

It was then, as she hung up her towels, 93 that she made the remark about walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the field could not commit her to anything.

“If you are going up,” said Aunt Jessica, “perhaps you will take some of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade.”

That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one’s words, she never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.

The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business—Elliott had expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity 94 with activity. They all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott’s advent would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow’s nest that the scythes had disclosed.

It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill little yelp, “Come on! Come on, peoples! You 95 don’t know what we’ve got here,” before they straggled over to what Henry called “the refreshment booth.”

Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.

And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her words with a whole battery of dimples, all the while privately resolving that no contagion of enthusiasm should inoculate her with the haymaking germ. There were factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand; the sky was so blue, the breeze was so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious, and the mountain air had such zest in it. But, on the other hand, the sun was hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla’s tip-tilted little nose was already liberally besprinkled. If Laura hadn’t such 96 a wonderful skin, she would have been a sight long ago, despite the wide brim of her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and Laura looked like a mere husky farm girl, as she guided her horses skilfully around the field. How strong her arms must be! But how could a girl with Laura’s intelligence and high spirit and charm enjoy putting all this time into haying? With Priscilla, of course, matters stood differently. Children never discriminate.

“No, I sha’n’t do that kind of thing,” said Elliott, firmly. But she would investigate the haymaking game, investigate it coolly and dispassionately, to find out exactly what it amounted to—aside, of course, from an accumulation of dried grass in barns. To this end, she invaded the upper meadow a good many times, during the next few days, took a turn on the hay-rake, now and then helped load and unload, riding down to the barn on a mound of high-piled fragrance, and came 97 to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking wasn’t to be compared with knocking a ball back and forth across a net. To try one’s hand at it might do well enough, now and then, to spice an otherwise luxurious life, but as a steady diet the thing was too unrelenting. One was driven by wind and sun; even the clouds took a hand in cudgeling one on. A person must keep at it whether she cared to or not—in actual practice this point never troubled Elliott, who always stopped when she wished to—there were no spectators, and, heaviest demerit of all, it was undeniably hard work.

But she was curious to discover what Laura found in it, and you know Elliott Cameron well enough by this time to understand that she was not a girl who hesitated to ask for information.

The last load had dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding her long black 98 braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on the bed and watched her.

“Aren’t you glad it’s done?” she asked.

“The haying? Oh, yes, I’m always glad when we have it safely in. But I love it.”

“Really? It isn’t work for girls.”

“No? Then once a year I’ll take a vacation from being a girl. But that doesn’t hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls can do, to help win this war.”

“To help win the war?” echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn’t done much of it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?

“Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?” Laura questioned. “Just for fun, 99 or for the money we could get out of it?”

“I hadn’t thought much about it,” said Elliott. She was thinking now. Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.

“I never thought of it as war work,” she said. “Stupid, wasn’t I?”

Laura put the last hair-pin in place. “Just thought of it as our job, did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work too—well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I’ve never been so thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every one of us such a splendid chance to feel we’re really counting in this fight—the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here.” Laura’s dark eyes were beginning to shine. “Oh, I wouldn’t be anywhere but on a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in France!”

She stopped suddenly, put down the 100 hand-mirror with which she was surveying her back hair, and blushed. “There!” she said, “I forgot all about the fact that you weren’t born on a farm, too. But then, you can share ours for a year, so I’m not going to apologize for a word I’ve said, even if I have been bragging because I’m so lucky.”

Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a tread that isn’t there. Elliott’s own cheeks reddened as she thought of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn’t seemed to notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized, with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn’t understand why her cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain the fact to her.

But Elliott couldn’t let herself pass as an intentional slacker.

“We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting, too, of course, but canteening was the most fun.”

“That must have been fine.” Laura was interested at once.

Elliott’s spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. “Do you have a canteen here?”

“Oh, no, Highboro isn’t big enough. No trains stop here for more than a minute. We’re not on the direct line to any of the camps, either.”

“Ours was a regular canteen,” said Elliott. “They would telephone us when soldiers were going through, and we would go down, with Mrs. Royce or Aunt Margaret or some other chaperon, and distribute post-cards and cigarettes and sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if the weather was hot. It was such fun to talk to the men!”

“Ice-cream and cigarettes!” laughed Laura. “I should think they’d have liked something nourishing.”

“Oh, they got the nourishing things, if it was time. The Government had an arrangement with a restaurant just around the corner to serve soldiers’ meals. We didn’t have to do that.”

“You supplied the frills.”

“Yes.” Somehow Elliott did not quite like the words.

Laura was quick to notice her discomfiture. “I imagine they needed the frills and the jollying, poor lonesome boys! They’re so young, many of them, and not used to being away from home; and the life is strange, however well they may like it.”

“Yes,” said Elliott. “More than one bunch told us they hadn’t seen anything to equal what we did for them this side of New York. Our uniforms were so becoming, too; even a plain girl looked cute 103 in those caps. Why, Laura, you might have a uniform, mightn’t you, if it’s war work?”

“What should I want of a uniform?”

“People who saw you would know what you’re doing.”

“They know now, if they open their eyes.”

“They’d know why, I mean—that it’s war work.”

“Mercy! Nobody around here needs to be told why a person hoes potatoes these days. They’re all doing it.”

“Do you hoe potatoes?” Elliott had no notion how comically her consternation sat on her pretty features.

Laura laughed at the amazed face of her cousin. “Of course I do, when potatoes need hoeing.”

“But do you like it?”

“Oh, yes, in a way. Hoeing potatoes isn’t half bad.”

Elliott opened her lips to say that it 104 wasn’t girls’ work, remembered that she had made that remark once before, and changed to, “It is hard work, and it isn’t a bit interesting.”

Then Laura asked two questions that left Elliott gasping. “Don’t you like to do anything except what is easy? Though I don’t know that it is any harder to hoe potatoes for an hour than to play tennis that length of time. And anything is interesting, don’t you think, that has to be done?”

“Goodness, no!” ejaculated Elliott, when she found her voice. “I don’t think that at all! Do you, really?”

“Why, yes!” Laura laughed a trifle deprecatingly. “I’m not bluffing. I never thought I’d care to spray potatoes, but one day it had to be done, and Father and the boys were needed for something else. It wasn’t any harder to do than churning, and I found it rather fun to watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated, too, how many Belgians the potatoes 105 in those hills would feed, either directly or by setting wheat free, you know. I forget now how many I made it. I know I felt quite exhilarated when I was through. Trudy helped.”

“Goodness!” murmured Elliott faintly. For a minute she could find no other words. Then she managed to remark: “Of course every one gardens at home. They have lots at the country club, and raise potatoes and things, and you hear them talking everywhere about bugs and blight and cold pack. I never paid much attention. It didn’t seem to be meant for girls. The men and boys raise the things and the wives and mothers can them. That’s the way we do at home.”

“Traditional,” nodded Laura. “We divide on those lines here to a certain extent, too; but we’re rather Jacks of all trades on this farm. The boys know how to can and we girls to make hay.”

“The boys can?”

“Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What does it matter who does a thing, so it’s done?”

Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura’s last remark, which had not sounded very sensible to her—of course it mattered who did things; why, that sometimes was all that did matter!—and reflected that, country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on one’s clothes.

But Laura’s hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott’s standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot 107 do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and berries and fruits. Elliott hadn’t meant to look so fixedly at Laura’s hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, “If you prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine into too many pies ever to have them look well.”

“They’re a lovely shape,” said Elliott, seriously.

And then, to her amazement, Laura laughed and leaned over and hugged her. “And you’re a dear thing, even if you do think my hands are no lady’s!”

Of course Elliott protested; but as that was just what she did think, her protestations were not very convincing.

“You can’t have everything,” said Laura, quite as though she didn’t mind in 108 the least what her hands looked like. The strangest part of it all was that Elliott believed Laura actually didn’t mind.

But she didn’t know how to answer her, Laura’s words had raised the dust on all those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott had had sitting about in her mind for so long that she supposed they were her very own opinions. Until the dust settled she couldn’t tell what she thought, whether they belonged to her or had simply been dumped on her by other people. She couldn’t remember ever having been in such a position before.

Yes, Elliott found a good deal to think of. One had to draw the line somewhere; she had told herself comfortably; but lines seemed to be very queerly jumbled up in this war. If a person couldn’t canteen or help at a hostess house or do surgical dressings or any of the other things that had always stood in her mind for girl’s war work, she had to do what she could, 109 hadn’t she? And if it wasn’t necessary to be tagged, why, it wasn’t. Laura in blouse and short skirt, or even in overalls, seemed to accomplish as much as any possible Laura in a pantaloon suit or puttees or any other land uniform. There really didn’t seem any way out, now that Elliott understood the matter. Perhaps she had been rather dense not to understand it before.

“What would you like me to do this morning, Uncle?” she asked the next day at the breakfast-table. “I think it is time I went to work.”

“Going to join the farmerettes?”

“Thinking of it.” She could feel, without seeing, Stannard’s stare of astonishment. No one else gave signs of surprise. Stannard, thought the girl, really hadn’t as good manners as his cousins.

Uncle Bob surveyed the trim figure, arrayed in its dark smock and the shortest of all Elliott’s short skirts. If he felt other 110 than wholly serious he concealed the fact well.

“The corn needs hoeing, both field-corn and garden-corn. How about joining that squad?”

“It suits me.”

Corn—didn’t Hoover urge people to eat corn? In helping the corn crop, she too might feel herself feeding the Belgians.

Gertrude linked her arm in her slender cousin’s as they left the table. “I’ll show you where the tools are,” she said. “Harry runs the cultivator in the field, but we use hand-hoes in the garden.”

“You will have to show me more than that,” said Elliott. “What does hoeing do to corn, anyhow?”

“Keeps down the weeds that eat up the nourishment in the soil,” recited Gertrude glibly, “and by stirring up the ground keeps in the moisture. You like to know the reason for things, too, don’t you? I’m glad. I always do.”

It wasn’t half bad, with a hoe over her shoulder, in company with other boys and girls, to swing through the dewy morning to the garden. Priscilla had joined the squad when she heard Elliott was to be in it, and with Stannard and Tom the three girls made a little procession. It proved a simple enough matter to wield a hoe. Elliott watched the others for a few minutes, and if her hills did not take on as workmanlike an appearance as Tom’s and Gertrude’s, or even as Priscilla’s, they all assured her practice would mend the fault.

“You’ll do it all right,” Priscilla encouraged her.

“Sure thing!” said Tom. “We might have a race and see who gets his row done first.”

“No races for me, yet,” said Elliott. “It would be altogether too tame. I’d qualify for the booby prize without trying. But the rest of you may race, if you want to.”

“Just wait!” prophesied Stannard darkly. “Wait an hour or two and see how you like hoeing.”

Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand, she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.

“Run along, little boy, to your row,” she admonished him. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”

Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she hadn’t, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a time—it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours—she thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed her 113 fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her behind.

Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott’s. “That looks fine,” she said, “for a beginner. You must stop and rest whenever you’re tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy, not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won’t let us girls work when the sun’s too hot, either.”

Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first time in her life she didn’t feel quite like letting herself do what she wished to.

What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?—a few scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn’t matter to the 114 Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else whether she hoed or didn’t hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that, even of garden-patches—but not every one would say it. Some people knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how long this row was! Would she ever, ever reach the end?

Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. “That looks nice. You haven’t got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you’ve done ’em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip along real quick.”

Elliott leaned on her hoe. “Do you play the piano?”

“Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by. I must get back to my row.”

“Do you like hoeing?” Elliott called after her.

“I like to get it done.” The small figure skipped nimbly away.

“‘Get it done!’” Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green blades, pessimism in her voice. “After one row, isn’t there another, and another, and another, forever?” She slashed into a mat of chickweed with venom.

“I knew you’d get tired,” said Stannard, at her elbow. “Come on over to those trees and rest a bit. Sun’s getting hot here.”

Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body, turning her muscles slack. Hadn’t Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn’t let them work in too hot a sun?

“You’re tired; quit it!” urged Stannard.

“Not just yet,” said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.

Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to go with Stan. Then why hadn’t she gone? The question puzzled the girl. Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her hesitate to try it now?

She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: “This war will be won by tired men who—” She couldn’t quite get the rest. An impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired, dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn’t they? 117 It seemed absurd; but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren’t something in it? If all they said was true, why—and Elliott’s tired back straightened—why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be if she didn’t quit.

It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought, of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on the veranda, but that isn’t always the way things work. Now she seemed to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere. It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then the minute 118 passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again she was aware only of a suspicion that possibly when one was having the most fun was not always when one was being the most useful.

“Well,” said a pleasant voice, “how does the hoeing go?”

And there stood Laura with a pitcher in her hand, and on her face a look—was it of mingled surprise and respect?

“You mustn’t work too long the first day,” she told Elliott. “You’re not hardened to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now and try it again later on. I have your book under my arm.”

When, that noon, they all trooped up to the house, hot and hungry, Elliott went with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody thanked her for anything, and she didn’t even notice the lack. Farming wasn’t like canteening, where one expected thanks. As she scrubbed her hands she noticed that her nails were hopeless, but her attention 119 failed to concentrate on their demoralized state. Hadn’t she finished her row?

“Stuck it out, did you?” said Bruce, as they sat down at dinner. “I bet you would.”

“I shouldn’t have dared look any of you in the face again, if I hadn’t,” smiled Elliott. But his words rang warm in her ears.