"Most every day," Moses said, proudly, "she bought me these pants, too."
"Does she do any cooking?"
"She don't like to cook, and she ain't never learned. I kin learn her when I've learned myself some more."
"It does seem as if there were some improvement in your family's condition, doesn't it, Moses?"
"Judidy, she told Ma she was the town's poor, and Ma says she ain't. That kind of stuck in Ma's crop, and Madget cried and said she wouldn't go to the poor house. Now Ma says she is going to buy tea and coffee enough to git a premium set o' dishes. I don't know whether she will or not. If she don't I'm going to earn them. Captain Swift is going to let me sell some corn and string beans out of his garden."
The path emerged on the beach, and Moses disappeared abruptly in the direction of his favourite clump of pines, scorning a bath-house. He reappeared almost immediately, clad in a single garment of blue jersey that glistened with newness.
"You watch me pretending to be a whale," he said, "first I'll dive. Then I'll come up spouting a whole mouthful of water."
"He's a good little swimmer," Elizabeth thought, as she watched his antics. "I guess he'll turn out all right. How wonderful Grandmother is, always keeping her eye on them. It's so much easier to do a thing like that as hard as you can sometimes, and then drop it, than it is to keep pegging along at it all the time."
She was knitting so busily that she did not see Ruth Farraday approaching along the beach, and it was not until a long shadow fell across her work that she realized Ruth was near. Ruth in a pink voile frock, with a frilly, rose-coloured parasol, smiled down at her—a smile of the lips only.
"Shall I sit down beside you?" she asked, in her low, clear voice. "Peggy couldn't come down to the beach to-day. I was too lazy to go in swimming, but I thought I'd like a smell of the sea, all the same."