“I think,” remarked Elliott, the next morning, “that I will walk up and watch the haying for a while.”
She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn’t spend six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as were this household’s members, and do nothing at all. 92 That was the disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the pans shine.
Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way through the kitchen. “What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every one of them.”
A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica’s praise made them doubly so.
It was then, as she hung up her towels, 93 that she made the remark about walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the field could not commit her to anything.
“If you are going up,” said Aunt Jessica, “perhaps you will take some of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade.”
That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one’s words, she never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.
The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business—Elliott had expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity 94 with activity. They all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott’s advent would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow’s nest that the scythes had disclosed.
It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause. Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill little yelp, “Come on! Come on, peoples! You 95 don’t know what we’ve got here,” before they straggled over to what Henry called “the refreshment booth.”
Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.