"Mamma, I like the sun."
"Nonsense. Go straight and fetch it and put it on. Do you want to be speckled like your ugly old mother-hen?"
It was a care and pride that would have turned another and far less lovely head than Peggy's, yet in spite of it this country school-girl ripened sweetly. Driving on country visits I used to meet her by the way, walking easily and humming to herself the while, her books and luncheon swinging at her side—a perfect model for romantic painters who run to milk-maids, or, as Letitia used to say, the veritable Phyllis of old English song.
The mother rose at dawn; she toiled by sunlight and by lamplight; her face grew haggard, her figure gaunter, her voice sharper with bitter irony, her heart harder save in that one lone corner which was kept soft—solely for her child. Peggy, I believe, was the only living thing she smiled upon. Neighbors dreaded her cutting tongue; her husband was too dazed to care.
Time went by. In spite of that stern resolve in the woman's nature, and all her labor and frugal scheming, what with the failure of crops and her lack of knowledge of their better care, and an old encumbrance whose interest could be barely met on the quarter-days that cast their shadows on the whole round year, the farm declined. Letitia's gifts from her own wardrobe were all that kept Peggy Neal in school. It was a word from Letitia also that raised the cloud on the mother's face when despair was darkest there. Might not summer-boarders, Letitia asked, bear a surer, more golden harvest than those worn-out fields?
"Summer-boarders!" cried Mrs. Neal, with a grim irony in her voice. But she repeated it—"Summer-boarders," in a milder tone, and the plan was tried.
The first ones came in June. They descended noisily from the fast express, lugging bags and fishing-rods and guns. Some of them stared; some young ones whistled softly at the fair driver of that old two-seated buckboard waiting to bear them to the farm. They greeted effusively—for the daughter's sake—the hard-mouthed woman who met them at the door, striving her best to smile a welcome. She it was who showed them their plain but well-scrubbed chambers, while their minds were at the barn.
Pastures and orchards bore strange fruit that summer: white-faced city clerks in soft, pink shirts smoked cigarettes and browned in the sun; freckled ladies set up their easels in the cow-lot; high-school professors asked one another puzzling questions, balanced cannily on the topmost rail of the Virginia fence, and all—all, that is, to a man—helped Peggy carry in the milk, helped Peggy churn, helped Peggy bake, helped Peggy set the table, and clear it, and wipe the dishes, and set them safely away again in the dim pantry—helped Peggy to market, and Peggy to church: so rose her star.