“I hadn’t thought much about it,” said Elliott. She was thinking now. Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.
“I never thought of it as war work,” she said. “Stupid, wasn’t I?”
Laura put the last hair-pin in place. “Just thought of it as our job, did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work too—well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I’ve never been so thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every one of us such a splendid chance to feel we’re really counting in this fight—the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here.” Laura’s dark eyes were beginning to shine. “Oh, I wouldn’t be anywhere but on a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in France!”
She stopped suddenly, put down the 100 hand-mirror with which she was surveying her back hair, and blushed. “There!” she said, “I forgot all about the fact that you weren’t born on a farm, too. But then, you can share ours for a year, so I’m not going to apologize for a word I’ve said, even if I have been bragging because I’m so lucky.”
Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a tread that isn’t there. Elliott’s own cheeks reddened as she thought of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn’t seemed to notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized, with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn’t understand why her cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain the fact to her.
But Elliott couldn’t let herself pass as an intentional slacker.
“We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting, too, of course, but canteening was the most fun.”
“That must have been fine.” Laura was interested at once.
Elliott’s spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. “Do you have a canteen here?”