“Well, I wish I could say the same for my white muslin,” sighed Judith. “I’ve a great mind to wear it hind part before, to make a little change in it. Anyhow, I intend to have just as good a time in it as though it were white chiffon, embroidered in gold beads. My white pumps aren’t so bad looking. I’ll take time to-morrow to shampoo my hair. Do you know, Mumsy, Cousin Ann Peyton’s wig is just the color of my hair. Poor old lady! Pity she can’t lose it!”
It was Thursday night. The day’s work was over, the last dish from the motormen’s supper washed and put away and Mrs. Buck and her daughter were having a quiet chat, seated on the side porch. It was a pleasant spot, homelike 132 and comfortable. It was on this porch that the summer activities of the farm were carried on. Here they prepared fruit for preserving and even preserved, as a kerosene stove behind a screen in the corner gave evidence. Here they churned, in a yellow cradle churn, and worked the butter.
“It saves the house if you can do most of your work in the open,” Mrs. Buck had said.
Judith had stretched a hammock across the corner of the porch, and now she was allowing herself to relax for awhile before going to bed. She pushed herself gently to and fro with one slender foot on the porch floor, and looked out dreamily over the fields flooded with moonlight—fields bought by her grandfather Knight from her grandfather Buck, inherited by him from his father, who had inherited from his father. Each generation had done what it could to impoverish the land and never to improve it. Now it was up to her, nothing but a slip of a girl nineteen years old, to buy guano and bring the land back to its original value.
“Ho, hum! If Grandfather Buck hadn’t wasted so much and Grandfather Knight hadn’t saved so much I could put my earnings in a new georgette dress to wear to the old men’s debut ball,” she sighed. 133
A few vehicles passed the house—now an old-fashioned buggy, now a stylish touring car—each one leaving a trailing cloud of limestone dust.
“Listen, Judith, I heard the gate click.”
“Nothing but an owl clucking, Mumsy. I heard it, too, but nobody would be coming to see us this time of night.”
“It might be some young beaux coming to see you,” suggested Mrs. Buck. “You’d have plenty of them if you weren’t so—so—businesslike.”
Judith laughed merrily. “Well, I reckon they’d come anyhow if they wanted to, but I must say, Mumsy, I’m kind of snobbish about your so-called beaux. I might like the boys if they would only stop being so silly and understand that I’m a human being with a mind and soul. I reckon I’ve always been too busy to play much with the boys around Ryeville. The old men like me though.”