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Page 12
[Illustration: She had greatly enjoyed doing her own hair.]
Cousin Ann set her iron down with the soft thump which Elizabeth Ann had
heard upstairs. She began folding a napkin, and said: "Now reach
yourself a bowl off the shelf yonder. The oatmeal's in that kettle on
the stove and the milk is in the blue pitcher. If you want a piece of
bread and butter, here's a new loaf just out of the oven, and the
butter's in that brown crock."
Elizabeth Ann followed these instructions and sat down before this
quickly assembled breakfast in a very much surprised silence. At home it
took the girl more than half an hour to get breakfast and set the table,
and then she had to wait on them besides. She began to pour the milk out
of the pitcher and stopped suddenly. "Oh, I'm afraid I've taken more
than my share!" she said apologetically.
Cousin Ann looked up from her rapidly moving iron, and said, in an
astonished voice: "Your share? What do you mean?"
"My share of the quart," explained Elizabeth Ann. At home they bought a
quart of milk and a cup of cream every day, and they were all very
conscientious about not taking more than their due share.
"Good land, child, take all the MILK you want!" said Cousin Ann, as
though she found something shocking in what the little girl had just
said. Elizabeth Ann thought to herself that she spoke as though milk ran
out of a faucet, like water.
She was very fond of milk, and she made a very good breakfast as she sat
looking about the low-ceilinged room. It was unlike any room she had
ever seen.
It was, of course, the kitchen, and yet it didn't seem possible that the
same word could be applied to that room and the small, dark cubby-hole
which had been Grace's asthmatical kingdom. This room was very long and
narrow, and all along one side were windows with white, ruffled curtains
drawn back at the sides, and with small, shining panes of glass, through
which the sun poured a golden flood of light on a long shelf of potted
plants that took the place of a window-sill. The shelf was covered with
shining white oil-cloth, the pots were of clean reddish brown, the
sturdy, stocky plants of bright green with clear red-and-white flowers.
Elizabeth Ann's eyes wandered all over the kitchen from the low, white
ceiling to the clean, bare wooden floor, but they always came back to
those sunny windows. Once, back in the big brick school-building, as she
had sat drooping her thin shoulders over her desk, some sort of a
procession had gone by with a brass band playing a lively air. For some
queer reason, every time she now glanced at that sheet of sunlight and
the bright flowers she had a little of the same thrill which had
straightened her back and gone up and down her spine while the band was
playing. Possibly Aunt Frances was right, after all, and Elizabeth Ann
WAS a very impressionable child. I wonder, by the way, if anybody ever
saw a child who wasn't.
At one end, the end where Cousin Ann was ironing, stood the kitchen
stove, gleaming black, with a tea-kettle humming away on it, a big hot-
water boiler near it, and a large kitchen cabinet with lots of drawers
and shelves and hooks and things. Beyond that, in the middle of the
room, was the table where they had had supper last night, and at which
the little girl now sat eating her very late breakfast; and beyond that,
at the other end of the room, was another table with an old dark-red
cashmere shawl on it for a cover. A large lamp stood in the middle of
this, a bookcase near it, two or three rocking-chairs around it, and
back of it, against the wall, was a wide sofa covered with bright
cretonne, with three bright pillows. Something big and black and woolly
was lying on this sofa, snoring loudly. As Cousin Ann saw the little
girl's fearful glance alight on this she explained: "That's Step, our
old dog. Doesn't he make an awful noise! Mother says, when she happens
to be alone here in the evening, it's real company to hear Shep snore--
as good as having a man in the house."
Although this did not seem at all a sensible remark to Elizabeth Ann,
who thought soberly to herself that she didn't see why snoring made a
dog as good as a man, still she was acute enough (for she was really
quite an intelligent little girl) to feel that it belonged in the same
class of remarks as one or two others she had noted as "queer" in the
talk at Putney Farm last night. This variety of talk was entirely new to
her, nobody in Aunt Harriet's conscientious household ever making
anything but plain statements of fact. It was one of the "queer Putney
ways" which Aunt Harriet had forgotten to mention. It is possible that
Aunt Harriet had never noticed it.
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