losing a fortune in melted snow. Still, I felt a new sympathy.
Mother turned to me.
“We are going to ask Grandma Bard to come to live with us,” she said. “Will you like that?”
I sat up in the hammock. “All the time?” I joyfully inquired.
“For the rest of the time,” Mother said soberly. “It seems as if one ought to take a child,” she added to the others, “when one takes anybody. . . .”
“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
