"I—I think Buddy's right."
"Well, he ain't going to be right very long if you think so. When I was growing up, I used to have a stylish city friend that I spent a good deal of time with. She was the daughter of the biggest man we had had from these parts, and she used to spend her summers at home, in the big white house on Main Street—the one with the pillars and the cedar hedge, just opposite the post office. She used to get her dresses from Paris, and let me make copies of them, too, and she was courted by a member of the governor's staff. I don't know as she ever had a brother-in-law that was a count——"
"Oh, Grandmother!"
"Well, let Grandma have her joke—as long as she can keep Grandpa quiet. Well, when we was little girls, she used to love to go to my grandma's with me."
"Not Grandmother Elspeth's?"
"No, my grandmother; Grandmother White. Well, Mary's folks mostly lived away from here, and most of the ways and doings of home folks was a novelty to her. She liked to get Grandma telling about old times on Cape Cod. You see, when Grandmother was a little girl, her mother was bedridden, and the whole family was taken care of by her and a neighbour's daughter, a little girl called Hopey D.—I never knew what the rest of her name was. As fast as the babies come along, they was put in the old settee cradle, and she and Hopey used to have to change places sitting and rocking there all the time they wasn't doing housework. That's the same settee you got in your room upstairs. Grandma used to tell how the fire would go out in the old fireplace, on account of she and Hopey not keeping it going right. Those were the days before matches, you know; and she used to have to run through the woods to the nearest neighbour, who lived a mile away, to borrow fire and bring it home in a swinging pail."
"Oh," Elizabeth cried. "Oh, that doesn't seem possible. I thought that the days before matches were way back in Columbus's time, or something."
"No. I've got a piece o' flint and a tinder box upstairs somewhere that came from Grandma's. Supposing you had to strike a spark from a piece o' flint before you could get the kettle to boiling."
"Supposing I had a bedridden mother, like poor Grandma White. Oh, I hope that Hopey D. was a nice little girl, and that she and great—no, great-great-grandmother had good times together."
"When Grandma used to tell all those old stories to my stylish friend, do you know how I felt? I felt mortified at having a grandma that wasn't more high toned, and I used to try to get Mary not to go there, so's we wouldn't have no more talk about running after a pail of fire, and rocking babies on the old settee and such."