“Sure,” she said heartily. “I counted ’em last night. I got seven.”
“I got five and a great long skin,” Betty competed hotly.
“Pooh,” said Calista, “I’ve got a scratch longer than my hand is. Teacher said maybe I’d get an infect,” she added importantly.
Then we kept on neutral ground, such as blank-books and Fourth of July and planning to go bare-foot some day, until Calista attacked a pickled peach which she had brought.
“Our whole cellar’s full of pickled peaches,” I incautiously observed. “I could have brought some if I’d thought.”
“We got more than that,” said Delia, instantly. “We got a thousand glasses of jelly left over from last year.”
“A thousand!” repeated Margaret Amelia, in derision. “A hundred, you mean.”
“Well,” Delia said, “it’s a lot. And jars and jars and jars of preserves. And cans and cans and cans....”
The others took it up. Why we should have boasted of the quantity of fruit in our parents’ cellars, I have no notion, save that it was for the unidentified reason which impels all boasting. When I am in a very new bit of country, where generalizations and multiplications follow every fact, I am sometimes reminded of the fashion of our talk whose statements tried to exceed themselves, in a kind of pyrotechnic pattern bursting at last into nothing and the night. We might have been praising climate or crops or real estate.
Mary Elizabeth spoke with something like eagerness.