"Got back at me that time, didn't you, Mother? I always feel uneasy after I get the better of you till you've worked the laugh round to me again. Well, I thought we'd be setting up till all hours of the night, entertaining John's girl, and hearing all the news of the family. I wonder if she always goes to bed before sundown. She didn't look a might sleepy to me."
"She travelled all the way from New York—of course she was sleepy."
"Her father brought her all the way from New York to Boston, and she rested there a couple of days before he put her on the Cape train. All she had to do was to sit among her bags and boxes till she got here. Three shiny black bags, she had, and as proud of 'em as if she had made 'em herself—and a wardrobe trunk. I thought myself that all trunks was wardrobe trunks until she told me different."
"You can't hardly judge the child till she gets settled down a little."
Grandfather Swift let his paper fall to the floor. Then he picked it up and folded it carefully, and made a place for it on the stand between the two windows under the wide fronds of Grandmother's pet fern, which was supposed never to be displaced for such a purpose.
"I did hope John's girl was going to be a little more like folks," he admitted.
The dimity curtains in the guest chamber puffed in the light night breeze. An insect with the voice of a bird set up a cheerful chirping just under her window, but Elizabeth Swift, in a little, huddled heap on the four-poster bed that had belonged to her great-grandmother, with her head smothered in the best goose-feather pillows to shut out the sound she was making, was still sobbing as if she could never stop again.
"They don't even speak the English language," she was saying to herself. "They are just countrified and ordinary, and I've got to have them for my grandparents just as if they were like other people, and eat great hunks of corn beef and drink ginger tea, and never see my parents, or my dear, dear brother."
The goose-feather pillow got wetter and wetter until Elizabeth, still very miserable but quieter now, began to be concerned about the damage she was doing, and finally dragged herself up on the edge of the bed to examine it.
"I mustn't do damage to property, no matter how anguished I am," she thought. "People's things aren't to blame, if they do say 'hadn't oughter,' and 'ain't,' but I don't see how my own mother and my own Father John could have sent me here."