“Never. Too busy.”
“Or gets an invitation for a spin?”
“You’re behind the times.”
“So I see.”
“Harry told me that this summer is extra strenuous,” Stannard explained; “but they’ve always rather gone in for the useful, I take it. Had to, most likely. They’d be all right, too, if they didn’t live so. They’re a good sort, an awfully good sort. But, ginger, how a fellow’d have to hump to keep up with ’em! I don’t try. I do a little, and then sit back and call it done.”
If Elliott hadn’t been so miserable, she would have laughed. Stannard had hit himself off very well, she thought. He had his good points, too. Not once had he reminded her that she hadn’t intended to spend her summer on a farm. But she was too unhappy to tease him as she might have done at another time. She was still bewildered and inclined to resent the trick life had played her. The prospect didn’t 60 look any better on close inspection than it had at first; rather worse, if anything. Imagine her, Elliott Cameron pitching hay! Not that any one had asked her to. But how could a person live for six weeks with these people and not do what they did? Such was Elliott’s code. Delightful people, too. But she didn’t wish to pitch hay and she loathed washing dishes. There was something so messy about dish-washing, ordinary dish-washing; milk-pans were different.
Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a strange thing. By this time she had shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself and her disgust to the edge of the woods. She was so very miserable that she didn’t know herself and she knew herself less than ever in this next act. Alone in the woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with vehemence stamped it. 61 “I don’t like things!” she whispered, a little shocked at her own words. “I don’t like things!”
Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.
For a minute the hot color flooded the girl’s face. But she seized the bull by the horns. “I am cross,” she said, “frightfully cross!” And she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he had never seen so attractive a girl.