"I don't see why mother don't use her silver spoons every day," she grumbled to Bea, wiping and laying down a pewter spoon disdainfully.
"She's goin' to leave 'em to me when she dies," returned that prudent young person. "I'm glad she doesn't wear 'em out, or maybe get one of 'em lost, before then."
There were only six teaspoons in all, and Mrs. Grigsby kept them in a locked drawer. It was all of a piece with the mean, skimpy, tiresome round of her daily life. There was no help for it—none.
The day dragged on more wearily and slowly than ever day had gone before. Her father could have told her, if she had confessed her misery to him, that much of it was the reaction after last night's excitement. As she did not speak of it, he paid little or no attention to her sober face and unwonted silence. She performed her share of dish-washing, table-setting, and table-clearing listlessly, but without complaint, and when not thus employed spent most of her time upstairs. Nobody asked what she did there; still less was anybody concerned to know what she felt there.
Dee—which is by interpretation David—had had a stupid day too. The Grigsby Sunday rules bore hard upon story books and toys, and an active boy of ten was soon at the end of his resources. His mother had scolded him a dozen times for making a noise and getting in her way, and boxed his ears twice.
After the last buffet Dee took refuge in the barn and the society of Dick and the horses. His father would not have approved of it, but his father was not at home. Coming in at dusk, the boy stole up stairs on tip-toe and peeped into his sister's room. The sun was fighting bravely with the bank of clouds on the horizon, and the world was bathed in lurid mist. By this flushed fogginess Dee could see Flea lying in a sort of crumpled heap on the floor by the window. She started up at the noise he made in entering.
"What do you want?" she demanded, crossly.
"You needn't get mad about it," returned her brother. "I'm just sick of Sunday, and I reckon you are too. Monday's worth fifty of it, if you do have to go to school. Ma's cross as two sticks, and pa's gone to look after things up at 'the house,' and Bea's on her high horse, and the young ones are worse'n a pack of bees for noise 'n' swarmin'." He sat down sociably upon the floor by his sister. "I say, Flea, what you s'pose you were sparred for?"
"Spared for? What are you talking about?"
"Dick says that Chaney says that ma says you were sparred for somethin' real big. Hadn't 'a' been for that, the moccasin would 'a' bit you sure, and you'd been dead before anybody could 'a' got to you for to draw the p'ison out. What you s'pose they meant? What you goin' to do?"