"That was a pretty caper you cut up with Dan Hayne!" she said in a sharp, angry tone. "If you begin this way you'll be the talk of the town in a year or two."
"I didn't want to go at first," I answered rather resentfully. "But then it was splendid."
"My advice to you is to keep out of Dan Hayne's way. Still, you're nothing but a chit! Set your cap for Homer or Ben."
"I don't want to set it for anybody," I returned, jerking my arm away.
One confessed to liking boys, and boys and girls played together, but lovers were quite different, not to be expected until you were grown up, and most of the courtships were very pronounced and rather brief. It was a sort of settled matter that Dan and Polly, who were unlike the average, would make a match some day. They sparred, and, like the smaller children, "made up," danced, went out riding—she had a saddle horse—and then for weeks tossed their heads loftily at each other. He went off down the Wabash and then to Cahokia, but Polly did not lack for attendants.
How busy the town seemed. Now the canal started afresh. Some of the old indebtedness was wiped out. The land along the border was sold in plots, and men set to work on a new basis. To hear them talk, it sounded as if values increased daily.
Sophie Piaget and I became very dear friends. I am not sure but I ought to include Homer. If he came to our house first we walked down to the Piagets; if Sophie came up we spent the evening in some simple games. Neither she nor Homer cared much for books. But she was very industrious and handy, with a certain French ingenuity, I suppose I ought to call it. She and her mother did fine dyeing and they made over gowns, or indeed concocted new ones. Sophie could tie a bow to perfection, straighten out crumpled artificial flowers, and give them a touch of fresh color that made them blossom anew. She really had the beautiful side of an artist without the intellectuality. But new countries have little demand for this. The fine arts came later.
There was a long pleasant fall. Business was thriving. Father built two new rooms on the house. We were beginning to have parlors, though the old-fashioned keeping room, where you sit and work and talk to your friends, the spinning wheel in one corner, the dresser with its drawers holding table linen, the shelves above for the best dishes, the commodious settle and the Boston rocker, hold a charm that modern rooms cannot give, for they had the heart of family life.
The winter brought great changes to me, set my life in a different key, the octave above childhood, girlhood, before the woman begins to unfold. I had been undersized, a truly little girl. Now I suddenly shot up like a sapling, not particularly thin, but slim, and outgrew all my skirts. I felt very, very sorry. I did not want to be grown up.
Sophie was delighted. Nanette kept pace with me. So did Letty Dole and Bessy Hale. We were not going to school. Fourteen was considered old enough to begin the real work of life. I was not quite that, but the house seemed to demand me. For M'liss, with all her sorrow of widowhood, had consoled herself and was to give her boy the strong hand to guide him through perilous ways. On the other side, she was to undertake two girls, six and eight. Mr. Weaver had a farm down south branch, kept cows and supplied people with milk.