In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.
For some reason or other as I looked down at her cuddling her dollies, I think I had never liked her so well in my whole life—even though I was still half disgusted with her for making me carry so many things to her. I guess I was a little worried, though, which probably helped me to like her better. I kept thinking about the woman who had been digging holes in the earth who thought Charlotte Ann looked enough like her own dead Elsa to be her twin—in fact, enough like her to be her. I wished the woman would hurry up and get well but she didn’t seem to be improving very much because the gang had kept on finding new holes all around Sugar Creek.
Pretty soon Charlotte Ann’s eyes went shut and stayed shut and her regular breathing showed that she was asleep.
Realizing that at last she was asleep, I went out through the living room into the kitchen and through that. Out-of-doors, I closed the screen door more quietly than it had been closed for a long time and went on out toward the iron pitcher-pump—being suddenly very thirsty.
Halfway to the pump I stopped on the boardwalk and turned around to see if anything was wrong, feeling something was, on account of nearly always by the time I got that far out-of-doors I heard the screen door slam behind me, but this time it hadn’t done it and it was a little bit confusing to me not to hear it.
Baby-sitting was hard work, I thought, and it would be silly to do two long hours of it actually sitting down.
A few tangled-up jiffies later I was up on our grape arbor in a perfect position for eating a piece of pie upside-down but I didn’t have any pie so I couldn’t baby-sit that way.