A half-hour had slipped by, during which her cousin had instructed her how to sit safely in a boat, and even how to row a little. Just as they turned a bend in the stream and floated into a cove where birches and wild grape-vines afforded a grateful bit of shade, the girl stopped rowing, and looking up at Mark, who sat indolently in the stern of the boat, made the remark with which this chapter began:
“I wonder if they are so—different!”
Pet’s pretty young forehead had a puzzled little wrinkle as she leaned forward, with the oar-blades rippling through the water, and the muslin sleeves falling back from her brown wrists.
“Are they so different, cousin Mark?”
Her companion gave an impatient twitch to his straw hat.
THE PIAZZA AT “THE EVERGLADES.”
“Why, of course! They are not like you, Pet. They are ignorant and poor and—and not clean, you know. They were born to it and they like it.”
“But it doesn’t seem right. I heard a lady on the piazza this morning say something about ‘those creatures’ in such a way that I thought she was speaking of rats or snakes. It turned out she meant the convicts who attacked their keepers at the prison last July.”
Pet spoke warmly, as she was apt to do when she once took up a subject. If she was yet a gay young creature, very fond of “good times,” and ready for any sort of fun, she yet was one of those girls with whom shallow young men at summer hotels are rather shy of entering into conversation. She was only fifteen, and one by one the terribly real problems of the day were marshalling themselves before her. She would not pass them by with a gay laugh, after the prevailing mode of her merry companions. She felt somehow that it belonged to her to help the world and make it better, as well as to the missionaries and other good people upon whose shoulders we so willingly pack responsibilities.