nto a mat of
chickweed with venom.

"I knew you'd get tired," said Stannard, at her elbow. "Come on over
to those trees and rest a bit. Sun's getting hot here."

Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their
shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration
stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body,
turning her muscles slack. Hadn't Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn't
let them work in too hot a sun?

"You're tired; quit it!" urged Stannard.

"Not just yet," said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.

Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to
go with Stan. Then why hadn't she gone? The question puzzled the girl.
Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that
Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her
hesitate to try it now?

She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence
flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged
from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: "This war
will be won by tired men who--" She couldn't quite get the rest. An
impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words
escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired,
dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or
going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything
to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn't they? It seemed absurd;
but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren't
something in it? If all they said was true, why--and Elliott's tired
back straightened--why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be
if she didn't quit.

It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott
visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought,
of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on
the veranda, but that isn't always the way things work. Now she seemed
to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench
that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open
and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was
indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere.
It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind
of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then
the minute passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again