At one end, the end where Cousin Ann was ironing, stood the kitchen stove, gleaming black, with a teakettle 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 Shep, 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.
When Elizabeth Ann finished her breakfast, Cousin Ann made three suggestions, using exactly the same accent for them all. She said: “Wouldn’t you better wash your dishes up now before they get sticky? And don’t you want one of those red apples from the dish on the side table? And then maybe you’d like to look around the house so’s to know where you are.” Elizabeth Ann had never washed a dish in all her life, and she had always thought that nobody but poor, ignorant people, who couldn’t afford to hire girls, did such things. And yet (it was odd) she did not feel like saying this to Cousin Ann, who stood there so straight in her gingham dress and apron, with her clear, bright eyes and red cheeks. Besides this feeling, Elizabeth Ann was overcome with embarrassment at the idea of undertaking a new task in that casual way. How in the world did you wash dishes? She stood rooted to the spot, irresolute, horribly shy, and looking, though she did not know it, very clouded and sullen. Cousin Ann said briskly, holding an iron up to her cheek to see if it was hot enough: “Just take them over to the sink there and hold them under the hot-water faucet. They’ll be clean in no time. The dishtowels are those hanging on the rack over the stove.”
Elizabeth Ann moved promptly over to the sink, as though Cousin Ann’s words had shoved her there, and before she knew it, her saucer, cup, and spoon were clean and she was wiping them on a dry checked towel. “The spoon goes in the side-table drawer with the other silver, and the saucer and cup in those shelves there behind the glass doors where the china belongs,” continued Cousin Ann, thumping hard with her iron on a napkin and not looking up at all, “and don’t forget your apple as you go out. Those Northern Spies are just getting to be good about now. When they first come off the tree in October you could shoot them through an oak plank.”
Now Elizabeth Ann knew that this was a foolish thing to say, since of course an apple never could go through a board; but something that had always been sound asleep in her brain woke up a little, little bit and opened one eye. For it occurred dimly to Elizabeth Ann that this was a rather funny way of saying that Northern Spies were very hard when you first pick them in the autumn. She had to figure it out for herself very slowly, because it was a new idea to her, and she was halfway through her tour of inspection of the house before there glimmered on her lips, in a faint smile, the first recognition of humor in all her life. She felt a momentary impulse to call down to Cousin Ann that she saw the point, but before she had taken a single step toward the head of the stairs she had decided not to do this. Cousin Ann, with her bright, dark eyes, and her straight back, and her long arms, and her way of speaking as though it never occurred to her that you wouldn’t do just as she said—Elizabeth Ann was not very sure that she liked Cousin Ann, and she was very sure that she was afraid of her.
So she went on, walking from one room to another, industriously eating the red apple, the biggest she had ever seen. It was the best, too, with its crisp, white flesh and the delicious, sour-sweet juice which made Elizabeth Ann feel
