her eyes wide. She had been accustomed to hear charm
and wit and vivacity spoken of in those terms, but dependableness? It
had always seemed such a homely, commonplace thing, not worth
mentioning. And here was Aunt Jessica talking of it as of a crown
jewel! Right down in her heart at that minute Elliott vowed that the
separator should always be clean.

The separator, however, must not commit her indiscriminately, she saw
that clearly. Perhaps in fact, it would save her. Hadn't Aunt Jessica
said each had her own tasks? Ergo, you let others alone. But she had
an uncomfortable feeling that this reasoning might prove false in
practice; in this household a good many tasks seemed to be pooled. How
about them?

And then Laura looked up from her jars and said the oddest thing yet
in all this morning of odd sayings: "Oh, Mother, mayn't we take our
dinner out? It is such a perfectly beautiful day!" As though a
beautiful day had anything to do with where you ate your dinner!

But Aunt Jessica, without the least surprise in her voice, responded
promptly: "Why, yes! We have three hours free now, and it seems a
crime to stay in the house."

What in the world did they mean?

Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in understanding. She jumped up
and down and cried: "Oh, goody! goody! We're going to take our dinner
out! We're going to take our dinner out! Isn't it _jolly_?"

She was standing in front of Elliott as she spoke, and the girl felt
that some reply was expected of her. "Why, can we? Where do we go?"
she asked, exactly as though she expected to see a hotel spring up out
of the ground before her eyes.

"Lots of days we do," said Priscilla. "We'll find a nice place. Oh,
I'm glad it takes peas three whole hours to can themselves. I think
they're kind of slow, though, don't you?"

Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott's face. "Priscilla means
that we are going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while the peas cook
in the hot-water bath," she explained. "Don't you want to pack up the
cookies? You will find them in that stone crock on the first shelf in
the pantry, right behind the door. There's a pasteboard box in there,
too, that will do to put them in."

"How many shall I put up?" questioned Elliott.

"Oh, as many as you think we'll eat. And I warn you we have good
appetites."

Those were the vaguest directions, Elliott thought, that she had ever
heard; but she found the box and the stone pot of cookies and stood a