“Goodness, no!” ejaculated Elliott, when she found her voice. “I don’t think that at all! Do you, really?”
“Why, yes!” Laura laughed a trifle deprecatingly. “I’m not bluffing. I never thought I’d care to spray potatoes, but one day it had to be done, and Father and the boys were needed for something else. It wasn’t any harder to do than churning, and I found it rather fun to watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated, too, how many Belgians the potatoes 105 in those hills would feed, either directly or by setting wheat free, you know. I forget now how many I made it. I know I felt quite exhilarated when I was through. Trudy helped.”
“Goodness!” murmured Elliott faintly. For a minute she could find no other words. Then she managed to remark: “Of course every one gardens at home. They have lots at the country club, and raise potatoes and things, and you hear them talking everywhere about bugs and blight and cold pack. I never paid much attention. It didn’t seem to be meant for girls. The men and boys raise the things and the wives and mothers can them. That’s the way we do at home.”
“Traditional,” nodded Laura. “We divide on those lines here to a certain extent, too; but we’re rather Jacks of all trades on this farm. The boys know how to can and we girls to make hay.”
“The boys can?”
“Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What does it matter who does a thing, so it’s done?”
Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura’s last remark, which had not sounded very sensible to her—of course it mattered who did things; why, that sometimes was all that did matter!—and reflected that, country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on one’s clothes.
But Laura’s hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott’s standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot 107 do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and berries and fruits. Elliott hadn’t meant to look so fixedly at Laura’s hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, “If you prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine into too many pies ever to have them look well.”
“They’re a lovely shape,” said Elliott, seriously.