"How did you get hardened?"
"Well, I took a spell to think about it. I can stand most anything if I can get my ideas fixed up about it."
"Oh, so can I," Elizabeth cried. "I guess I inherited it."
"I couldn't stand the sight o' blood, or hearing about killing a pig or a chicken, much less seeing the carcasses around. Well, I come to the conclusion that every time a chicken was killed somebody'd have to pick it, and I could pick a chicken if anybody else could. I figured out that if it wasn't me, it would have to be somebody else, probably just as squeamish. So I went ahead and caught a chicken and wrung its neck. I couldn't of chopped off its head if I suffered, but after Father helped me out that far, I cleaned it and picked it just like a storekeeper."
"I suppose that's the way you do get character, just by doing things that you can't do—all the time."
"Well, Providence sees that you have plenty of things to do that can't be done. I kinder hate to see young folks forcing themselves into it."
"I guess I'll go and see that chicken picked all the same, Grandmother," Elizabeth said.
She did not even put her fingers in her ears to shut out the sounds of attack and slaughter in the chicken yard when she went out to the woodshed and took her place determinedly on the step, companionably near the three-legged stool that her grandfather had drawn up to the door.
"What was the poetry you said you were going to say to me?" she began, "that poetry about Crocker Neck?"
"It's just what the girls used to say to the boys when they went a-courting: