What was the matter with Mother anyhow, Margaret and Ellen asked themselves over their four o’clock pieces of gingerbread. But they were not much worried. There was never very much the matter with Mother.
She hurried so that she was puffing as she went up the porch steps of the Knapp house—and yet when she opened the door she did not know why she had come nor what to say. Henry and Helen were just in also, enjoying cookies and milk and telling their father about the events of the day. The sight of the cookies gave Mattie her cue.
“Do those spice-cookies agree with Henry?” she asked.
“Sure they do,” said Lester. “Everything does nowadays! Henry seems to have grown right out of that weak stomach of his. He eats like a wolf, I tell him. The doctor says they do sometimes outgrow those childish things as they get near their teens.”
“Oh, yes, as they get near their teens,” said Mattie.
A moment later she asked, “Helen, aren’t you fatter than you used to be? Seems as though you were lots fuller in the face.”
“Did you just get around to notice that, Aunt Mattie?” said Helen, laughing. “You ought to see me trying to get into a last summer’s dress. They don’t come together—my!—there’s that much of a gap.” She showed with her hands how wide a gap it was.
“Helen has put on eight pounds,” explained Lester. “The school nurse says all the children are gaining like everything, now they serve milk at recess-time.”
“Oh, yes, milk at recess-time,” said Aunt Mattie.
Helen and Henry finished their cookies and tore out to inspect their poultry. The children and Lester had gone into the chicken-business on a small scale and were raising some brooder chicks in a packing-case chicken-house in the back yard. Stephen was there already, hanging over the low wire-netting “watching their tail-feathers grow,” as he said.