"It shouldn't be in her hands at all. But I have noticed since I have been here that she takes the arrangement of almost everything. My mother seems to have nothing to do in her own family."
"I wonder what the family or anybody in it would do without
Fleda!" said Hugh, his gentle eyes quite firing with
indignation. "You had better know more before you speak,
Charlton."
"What is there for me to know?"
"Fleda does everything."
"So I say and that is what I don't like."
"How little you know what you are talking about!" said Hugh. "I can tell you she is the life of the house, almost literally, we should have had little enough to live upon this summer if it had not been for her."
"What do you mean?" impatiently enough.
"Fleda if it had not been for her gardening and management she has taken care of the garden these two years, and sold I can't tell you how much from it. Mr. Sweet, the hotelman at the Pool, takes all we can give him."
"How much does her 'taking care of the garden' amount to?"
"It amounts to all the planting, and nearly all the other work, after the first digging by far the greater part of it."