"Oh, I don't know," said Tom. "'The queen was in the kitchen, eating bread and honey'—sweet, too, you see."
"Oh, Tom, you goose! No, she wasn't. The queen was in the parlor," cried Bab.
"Well, you never can tell about versions of Mother Goose, nor where love will get you; it may have been the kitchen," said Tom, the wise.
CHAPTER XVIII
UNDER THE HARVEST MOON
THE swelling twigs of March had burst into leafage; rough winds had shaken the "darling buds of May," and the fruit hung fully formed, even ripened in many cases, on the branches. The summer had flown past, a happy summer, the last of Jessamy's and Barbara's girlhood. Tom and Robert had urged their claim to begin their own homes by the autumn, and Mrs. Wyndham, who did not approve of long engagements, had yielded.
"I am not going to spend the very last summer that I am free to be as jolly as I wish, without responsibilities,—the last summer before I settle down into a frumpy, solemn old married woman,—struggling with clothes," Barbara declared. "If I can't get enough together to be married in a month, I will start life in a shirt-waist and a duck skirt. We are going to have the very best time we ever had, just we four, with our own particular boys for a kind of entrée, all summer until August, and then I will consent to talk dress-making. I think it is abominable the way weddings are turned into bugbears—as though they weren't bad enough in the best regulated households! That's what the nursery rhyme means:
"Needles and pins, needles and pins,
When a girl's married her trouble begins!"