Kit’s tone held a note of pathos that was delicious.
“Who cares about what’s happened in Gilead every day for seventy years?” Helen’s query was scoffing, but Jean said,
“Listen. Somebody, I forget who, that Father was telling about, said if the poorest, commonest human being who ever lived could write a perfect account of his daily life, it would be the most wonderful and interesting human document ever written.”
Helen’s expression showed plainly that she did not believe one bit in “sech sentiments,” as Shad himself might have put it. Life was an undiscovered country of enchantment to her where the sunlight of romance made everything rose and gold. She had always been the most detached one in the family. Only Kit with her straightforward, uncompromising tactics ever seemed to really get by the thicket of thorns around the inner palace of the sleeping beauty. Kit had been blessed with so much of her father’s New England directness and sense of humor, that no thorns could hold her out, while Doris and Jean were more like their mother, tender-hearted and keenly responsive to every influence around them.
“I don’t see,” Kit would say sometimes, “which side of the family Helen gets her ways from. I suppose if we could only trace back far enough, we’d find some princess ancestress who trailed her velvet gowns lightsomely over the morning dew and rode a snow white palfrey down forest glades for heavy exercise. Fair Yoland with the Golden Hair.”
“Anyway,” Helen said now, hanging over Jean’s chair, “be sure and write us all about Carlota and the Contessa, because they sound like a story.”
Doris came out of the kitchen with her finger to her lips.
“I’ve just this minute got that chicken to sleep. They’re such light sleepers, but I think it will get well. It only had its poor toes frost bitten. Joe found it on the ground this morning, crowded off the perch. Chickens look so civilized, and they’re not a bit. They’re regular savages.”
She sat down on the arm of Jean’s chair, and hugged the other side, with Helen opposite. And there flashed across Jean’s mind the picture of the evenings ahead without the home circle, without the familiar living-room, and the other room upstairs where at this time the Motherbird would be brushing out her long, soft hair, and listening to some choice bit of reading Mr. Robbins had run across during the day and saved for her.
“I just wish I had a chance to go west like Piney,” Kit said suddenly. “When I’m old enough, I’m going to take up a homestead claim and live on it with a wonderful horse and some dogs, wolf dogs, I think. I wish Piney’d wait till we were both old enough, and had finished school. She could be a forest ranger and I’d raise—”