“We’ll change about. The odd girl shall help 98 the cook. And one meal a day—either breakfast, dinner, or supper—we girls must cook, and Lizzie is going to have nothing to do with that meal.”
“Why! I can’t cook,” wailed Lil again.
“Good time for you to begin to learn, then,” Laura said, laughingly.
Some of the other girls looked disturbed at the prospect. “I can make fudge,” observed Nell, honestly, “but I never really tried anything else, except to make toast and tea for mother when she was ill and the maid was out.”
“Listen to that!” exclaimed the voice of Lizzie Bean, who had been listening frankly to the dialogue. “An’ I been doin’ plain cookin’ an’ heavy sweepin’ and hard scrubbin’ ever since I was knee-high to a toadstool!”
Bobby burst out laughing. “So have I, Lizzie!” she cried. “Only I have done it for Father Tom and my kid brothers and sisters when Mrs. Betsey was sick.”
Lily Pendleton turned up her nose—literally. “We’re going to have trouble with that girl,” she announced to Nellie. “She doesn’t know her place.”
But whatever Lizzie knew, or did not know, she did not shirk her share of the work. She stayed up after everybody else had retired and washed 99 every pot and pan and plate, and set her bread to rise for morning, and stirred up a big pitcher of flapjack flour to rise over night, peeled potatoes to fry, leaving them in cold water so they would not turn black, and set the long table fresh for breakfast.
When the earliest riser among the girls (who was Laura herself) peeped into the cooking tent at daybreak, the fire in the stove was already roaring, and Lizzie had gone down to the shore to wash her face and hands in the cold water. Laura ran down in her bathing suit.
“What do you think of this place, Lizzie?” she asked the solemn-faced girl.