Judith sat wondering why she could muster up so little interest and why she was not even offended by her sister's airs of superiority, as Lizzie May sang the praises of such urban elegancies as screen doors, garbage cans, and oil stoves.
"An' d'yuh know, Judy," she went on, "I hear there's talk of their startin' a picture show in Clayton. Wouldn't that be fine?"
"It wouldn't make no diff'rence to us," said Judith, smiling a little ruefully. "We're so fur off we'd never be able to git to it."
"Oh, but you must bring the young uns an' stop over night with me," said Lizzie May hospitably. "I got a grand new sanitary bed that his sister give us. All his folks seems to be well fixed. It's a pleasure, Judy, to be amongst people that's refined and has things nice."
Lizzie May seemed indeed to have assimilated the refinements of the town as the sponge sucks water. She was wearing high heeled pumps and nearsilk stockings, a skirt fashionably skimpy, a sweater of brilliant Kelly green and hair that had been put up over night in crimping pins. The mincing precision of her talk and ways had never been so apparent before, and she used the words "toilet" and "sanitary" with the connotations at once malodorous and antiseptic given to these once innocent words by urban Americans.
Judith felt a bit bewildered by all this newness: new clothes, new things, new words. "Toilet" and "sanitary," "swell" and "grand," were words that she had occasionally overheard in Clayton, but they fell strangely from Lizzie May's lips. She realized, with no particular feeling of regret, that the gulf between herself and her sister had widened.
She was glad when Lizzie May and her endlessly trained and endlessly guarded children were gone. Trying to pretend, to be interested in her sister's chatter had made her feel tired and headachy and she lay back in the rocking chair and closed her eyes. What a long time it seemed since she and Lizzie May were children together in the little log house that still stood scarcely more than a mile from where she sat. How changed was everything, and yet how unchanged. The same houses and barns stood where she had always seen them, the same people, looking scarcely different, moved in and out. But everything was stark now, bald and bare that in her childhood had been softened by haze, mysterious and beautiful. Beautiful indeed and mysterious the world had seemed then. She called to memory many things out of her happy childhood, the scent of drying tobacco and autumn evenings when they legged it, all five of them, around the clothesline prop, sniffing the winy air like young hounds. There were delirious June mornings, too, when she scampered down the pasture to bring up the cows, and pure April twilights lilac-scented that quickened into being young tendrils of fancy as airy and opalescent as morning gossamer.
How glad and forward looking had been all that time, how forward looking all the thoughts and stirrings and bubblings of youth, always reaching out, reaching out—to what?
Snorting and neighing in the glorious make believe that they were a prancing team, the boys came around the corner of the house trundling a homemade wagon. Annie, driving the wagon, uttered shrill squeals and giggles of delight.