“Well, then, hurry,” said she, still kindly.
“Yes,” said I evenly, “I am.”
When two sisters discourse like this before a guest, there creeps into their voices a note of preternatural sweetness, a restraint and simplicity of utterance that speak volumes to the trained ear.
I was hurrying all I could, but for my unnatural bridge I had not the materials I could have wished. I found a weathered wooden fence-rail, balanced one end of it on the cliff and the other end in the crotch of a big tree that leaned over the side hill; but this bridge had to be built up with a pile of sand, leaves, small stones, and stubble balanced carefully upon it. Meanwhile, my mother was busily drilling a hole in the rock to make a firm emplacement at a distance for leg number two.
Finally our three positions were approximately correct, and the more delicate process of adjustment began. Barbara, from under her dark cloth, gave muffled directions. We obeyed, shifting, screwing, unscrewing, adjusting. Our guest was still cheery. Success hovered before us in plain sight. So did the mosquitoes. Barbara's directions began to sound tense. They sounded especially tense when she spoke to me. I was balancing precariously part-way down the shale cliff, digging in my heels and doing the best I could with the materials at hand. Looking timidly up at my sister's black-draped, mosquito studded figure, I had been first conciliatory, then surly, then sullen. Barbara had now begun to focus.
“Lower!” said Barbara between her teeth.
Obediently we all three lowered.
“No, no, not you!” said Barbara to me. “Yours was too low already.”
There are moments in this life when the presence of a guest is an impediment to free speech. Barbara, as anybody can see, had the advantage. She was the commanding officer. Any response from me would have been a retort from the ranks. Since one of her other two helpers was her mother and the other a guest, her words to them had to be sugared. In a sugar-shortage, it is the lower classes who suffer. By this time one could easily distinguish her directions to me by their truculent tone.
“Make the bridge a trifle higher,” said she curtly.