“Still,” said father, “till we get in our heads something of what the state owes to old folks, there’s nobody but us to do its work....”
I hardly heard them. To make this come true at one stroke! Even to be able to adopt a child! How easily they could do things, these grown-up ones; and how magnificently they acted as if it were nothing at all ... like the giants planting city-seed and watching cities grow to the size and shape of giants’ flower beds....
They went on talking. Some of the things that they said we might have said ourselves. In some ways they were not so very different from us. Yet think what they could accomplish.
Watching them and listening, there in the April twilight, I began to understand. It was not only that they could have their own way. But for the sake of things that we had never yet so much as guessed or dreamed, it was desirable to be grown up.
IV
THE PICNIC
It was Delia Dart who had suggested our Arbour Day picnic. “Let’s have some fun Arbour Day,” she said.
We had never thought of Arbour Day in that light. Exercises, though they presented the open advantage of escape from the school grind, were no special fun. Fun was something much more intimate and intangible, definite and mysterious, casual and thrilling—and other anomalies.
“Doing what?” we demanded.
“Oh,” said Delia, restlessly, “go off somewheres. And eat things. And do something to tell about and make their eyes stick out.”