with Mother, she laid together two rose-coloured rose—coloured!—bits of her patchwork and quietly handed them to me to baste—none of your close stitches, only basting! Then she folded a newspaper and asked me to cut it and scallop it for her cupboard shelf. Then she found a handful of hickory nuts and brought me the tack-hammer and a flat-iron. . . .
“Oh, Mother, let’s not go yet,” I heard myself saying.
Going home—a delicate business, because stepping on any crack meant being poisoned forthwith—I tried to think it out: What was it that Mother and Grandma Bard knew that the rest didn’t know? I gave it up. All I could think of was that they seemed to know me.
“Isn’t Grandma Bard just grand?” I observed fervently. “I’m afraid,” Mother said thoughtfully, “that sometimes she has rather a hard time to get on.”
I was still turning this in my mind as we passed the wood yard. The wood yard was a series of vacant lots where some mysterious person piled cords and cords of wood, which smelled sweet and green and gave out cool breaths. Sometimes the gasoline wood-cutter worked in
