Eleanor looked at her and at the ruined farm for a minute very thoughtfully. Then she made up her mind.
“Well, if you’ve got to start all over again,” she said, “you are going to need a lot of help, and I don’t see why we can’t be the first to help you! Girls, we won’t go any further now. We’ll stay here and help these poor people to get started!”
“What can people like you do to help us?” asked the woman, scornfully. “This isn’t a joke—’t ain’t like a quiltin’ party!”
“Just you watch us, and see if we can’t help,” said Eleanor, sturdily. “We’re not as useless as we look, I can tell you that! And the first thing we’re going to do is to cook a fine dinner, and you are all going to sit right down on the ground and help us eat it. You’ll be glad of a meal you don’t have to cook yourselves, I’m sure. Where is your well, or your spring for drinking water? Show us that, and we’ll do the rest!”
Only half convinced of Eleanor’s really friendly intentions, the woman sullenly pointed out the well, and in a few moments Eleanor had set the girls to work.
“The poor things!” she said to Margery, sympathetically. “What they need most of all is courage to pick up again, now that everything seems to have come to an end for them, and make a new start. And I can’t imagine anything harder than that!”
“Why, it’s dreadful!” said Margery. “She seems to have lost all ambition—to be ready to let things go.”
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Eleanor. “And it’s in making them see that there’s still hope and cheer and good friendship in the world that we can help them most. I do think we can be of some practical use to them, too, but the main thing is to brace them up, and make them want to be busy helping themselves. It would be so easy for me to give them the money to start over again or I could get my friends to come in with me, and make up the money, if I couldn’t do it all myself.”
“But they ought to do it for themselves, you mean?”
“Yes. They’ll really be ever so much better off in the long run if it’s managed that way. Often and often, in the city, I’ve heard the people who work in the charity organizations tell about families that were quite ruined because they were helped too much.”