“Just wait!” prophesied Stannard darkly. “Wait an hour or two and see how you like hoeing.”
Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand, she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.
“Run along, little boy, to your row,” she admonished him. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she hadn’t, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a time—it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours—she thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed her 113 fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her behind.
Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott’s. “That looks fine,” she said, “for a beginner. You must stop and rest whenever you’re tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy, not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won’t let us girls work when the sun’s too hot, either.”
Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first time in her life she didn’t feel quite like letting herself do what she wished to.
What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?—a few scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn’t matter to the 114 Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else whether she hoed or didn’t hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that, even of garden-patches—but not every one would say it. Some people knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how long this row was! Would she ever, ever reach the end?
Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. “That looks nice. You haven’t got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you’ve done ’em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip along real quick.”
Elliott leaned on her hoe. “Do you play the piano?”