This time Elizabeth met his twinkling gaze. She rose from her task long enough to deposit an emphatic kiss on the top of a shiny, bald pate.
"Who called me a goose?" she said.
"In the circles you're accustomed to, I suppose they don't call such names?"
"This is the circle in which I move," Elizabeth said, "this circle of you and Grandmother and Judidy. Now I know where I inherited my cooking ability from—you, sir."
"Well, there was times when the crew could get their teeth into my pie crust," grandfather admitted.
Elizabeth slipped up to her room that afternoon, after her noonday dinner, and wrote to Jean:
Jeanie Dear:
I have learned so much since I came to Cape Cod, that I don't see how there is going to be much more in the world to learn. I suppose there will be, but I don't think it can possibly be so important. I was an untried child when I came here, and now look at me. You can't, but I wish you could. I have grown a little taller and, I think, a lot sadder looking. Also, I am healthier. I feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland, mentally, however—I have to keep running and running, to stay in the same place, and then I don't.
I have some things in my mind that I can hardly bear, and some that I can hardly wait for, and some that I can hardly believe. You know what they are all about. The first is Buddy's girl and her approaching wedding. I am to stand up with them. I couldn't refuse; how could I, Jean? It's just a terrible, terrible thing. Buddy doesn't know it, because he is coming out of the hospital and down here just as soon as he can, and I am afraid it would retard his recovery if I wrote him. So I am not telling him till he gets here. Do you wonder, Jean, that I feel like a so much older girl than I did when I first came down here? Sometimes I think that my hair ought to be quite gray, with all my responsibility. I lit a light once, in the middle of the night, and got up to see if I hadn't really got gray hair, I felt so gray. I keep having to decide what to tell Buddy and what not. I can't ask Mother, because Buddy would never forgive me if I did, and what he would do to me would turn me gray for a fact, I guess. I've hinted it all out to you to keep from bursting, but Jeanie, it isn't the same thing as talking to you. It's only like saying my prayers or writing a diary. Besides, I haven't told you details. Only the general facts.
The things I can hardly wait for are my parents and Buddy coming—my own brother, that has come out of the jaws of death in two senses, since I have seen him. Once from the Trenches and once from the U. S. Base Hospital. Having a brother is the strangest, sweetest thing. I'd rather have one than a sister, though I do think Ruth Farraday is beautiful, and Peggy's lot is, next to mine, the most fortunate in that respect. I ought not to crow like this to an only child, though.
The things I can hardly believe are the things I've been hearing about my ancestors. In a way, you know, I think it is more interesting to be an American than even to be a count. I've lived along all my life with the idea that I was a New Yorker, or rather a New Jerseyite with one foot on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, and I thought the cook was the cook and the butcher the butcher, and that was all there was to it. I had a grandfather and grandmother that I had idealized in my imagination, all dressed up in city clothes and manners. I didn't stop to think what I came from, except that Mother was an Endicott, and that all her relations lived abroad most of the time.
You know the rude shock I got when I came down here. The corner grocer is my distant uncle. The hired girl is a kind of cousin. The butcher that goes out selling things in a cart, meat all raw and pig pork that he has killed himself, is the family's friend. It seemed just plain awful to me at first. I didn't know what any of it meant. But now I'm getting to. I talked with grandfather, who quite rightly understands my horrid scruples and teases me to pieces about them, and I talked with Peggy, whose father tells her a lot of things. (Those girls get their niceness from their father.)
He says this early settlers' blood is a wonderful thing. It was mostly the younger sons of aristocrat families that settled here, and a great many of them married their cooks or serving maids. (Perhaps that's why cooking is such a general talent.) They had to hew a living out of a very sterile soil, and to learn all the virtues of thrift and prudence from actual practise. They didn't have any houses or money or matches or anything. They just had to make them, and learn not to be aristocrats, instead of learning to be. They had to make New England. Well, my grandparents and my great-great-great-greats did an awful lot about this. There wouldn't be any Cape Cod, if it hadn't been for these Industries that they were engaged in, and it's the most romantic thing, the way even young children lived this seagoing, hardy life in the school of hard knocks. My grandfather was a cook at a very early age, and was lost at sea, only he jumped into a coastwise steamer instead of being drowned.
It's all wonderful, about grandmother's being courted at a Harvest Ball, and her grandmother running to get fire in a swing-pail, and funny little old songs they sing. Do you know what I feel as if I had done? I feel my roots pushing right down into the ground, and I love the ground, and it loves my roots.
Also, I love you, my own Jeanie, and more so all the time as I grow better. Some time I am going to show you all this Cape. Well, now I must take up my cross and my scare again. I almost forgot it when I was writing.
Your Elizabeth.
When she had finished and stamped this letter, Elizabeth took it in her hand and went slowly down the stairs. It was nearly time for the auto-bus from the morning train, the rumble of which could be heard distinctly on the street beyond that on which the old house stood. Elizabeth always waited for this before she went to the post office. She had heard the whistle of the train some time since.
Her grandmother stood at the door.