Grandfather, equipped with as many shining pails as a tinware peddler, approached the car and stared at it gravely, though Peggy and Elizabeth were already in possession of the back seat.
"Too bad I couldn't find those girls," he said. "Mother's put a great heap of sweaters and aprons under the seat, so's if I should be lucky enough to pick them up on the way. Well, Lizzie"—this to the machine—"how cranky are you to-day? Crank by name and crank by nature," he made half a dozen ineffectual attempts at starting, and then succeeded suddenly, jumped into the car, and they were off with a snort and a flourish.
"You darling Granddaddy," Elizabeth said in his ear, "we're crazy to go huckleberrying, and Peggy says you know all the spots where they grow thickest."
"Well, well, how did you get here? I dusted my car out carefully just before I started. It don't seem as if I could overlook a couple o' girls o' that size."
"You didn't have your glasses on, Granddaddy."
They took the road to the north, winding white into the hazy distance.
"The road is like a white ribbon," Elizabeth said, "and those little scrubby pines, sitting low all along the way, are like—well, I don't know what they are like, but I like them. I don't complain if the trees on the Cape are not majestic, as they are in other summer resorts. You see a lot more sky when the trees are low."
"You stand up for Cape Cod," her grandfather said. "It's a pretty good place. You know the story of the old farmer who was driving back from his wife's funeral. 'I lived with that woman forty year,' he said, 'and toward the last, I really got to like her.'"
"Is that the way you feel about Cape Cod?" Peggy asked, mischievously. "I thought it was the way you felt about Lizzie."
"Lizzie's got her good qualities, like most o' the rest of us. She ain't got much natural pride about the way she looks, and she hates to admit that a man is stronger than she is, but when he once gets the best of the argument she goes along peaceable. There's a lot o' human nature to Lizzie."