Mrs. Robbins shook her head smilingly.
"I'm thinking more about a new steel range for the kitchen, Childie."
Roxana smiled too. Only a few weeks before, kitchen ranges had been things of small import with Betty Robbins. All that the Motherbird had been able to say when questioned at that time was that they cooked with electricity, and had a gas range, she believed, but Tekla was the one who knew.
"You'll have to burn wood out here, Helen, unless you get a tame lightning rod and hitch it to an electric stove," Kit said.
"I don't care what we have to do," Jean interposed. "I want the place; don't you, Mother?"
"I think I shall love it," said Mrs. Robbins, lifting her face to the swaying pine boughs overhead. "I wish that I could stay here now and not have to go away at all."
"Helen, put the kettle on, and we'll all have tea," chanted Kit. "You know, Cousin Roxy, we always make Helen fix our tea. It isn't that she does it so wonderfully better than the rest of us, but she thinks she does, and she makes the most enticing ceremonial of it. You want to burn incense and kowtow before her serene highness. Wait till you see her do it!"
Helen rose and made a deep curtsey before Miss Robbins.
"We ask the pleasure of your ladyship's presence at tea two weeks from today."
"Oh, I'll be here," Cousin Roxana answered. "But I guess we'll leave the ladyship behind. I've got a Quaker great-grandmother tucked in behind me along the line of ancestors, and there's a silver goblet up home that Benjamin Franklin drank from once when he was a guest at your great-great-great-grandfather Eliot's place on the old Providence plantations. Nice, pleasant, unassuming sort of man too, I've always heard tell he was. So I'm all democrat clear through."