"Dear me! Martha's field being cut already! How the years fly!" said Miss Ellen, with a sigh.
"Oh, do you think so? I think they drag," said Elaine, rather suddenly; and then repeated, as if to herself, "They drag for me."
Miss Willoughby felt for the girl, but her sense of what was fitting compelled her to utter a platitude.
"Time always passes more slowly for the young," she said. "When you are my age—"
"That will be in twenty-two years," said Elaine.
She said no more, but somehow her tone implied that she did not wish to live twenty-two years, and to the elder woman it sounded very sad.
She looked wistfully at her niece, wondering if it would be possible to get her sisters to see that some amusement beyond the annual school-feast and tea at one or two farmhouses was necessary for the young.
She longed to say that youth seemed so long because of the varied emotions and experiences crowded into it—emotions which were lifelong, minutes of revelation which seemed like years, hours in which one lived an age. But she knew Charlotte would feel it most unfitting to talk of emotions to a child, and dimly she began to feel sure that Charlotte must be wrong, or that somebody was wrong, that Elaine's was not a happy nor a normal state of girlhood.
Just then Miss Emily Willoughby entered the room. She was the youngest of the four, and rather handsome, though her style of hair was unbecoming, and her dress an atrocity.
"Is Elaine here? Oh, yes, I see she is. Elaine, Jane is ready for your walk, and I should like you to go along the valley to Poole, and tell Mrs. Battishill to send up twenty pounds of strawberries for preserving, as soon as they are ripe."