he stall where
Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the admiring women her platters heaped with
fried chicken, her roasts of beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams
with cloves stuck in the crisp brown fat and garnished with tansy and
parsley. The older women, having assured themselves that there were
twenty kinds of cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies,
repaired to the corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their
white aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork. They were a fine
company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them
there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and
several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs. Ericson
herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish
woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs. Oleson,
who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow
hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these grandmothers there were
more brown heads than white. They all had a pleased, prosperous air, as
if they were more than satisfied with themselves and with life. Nils,
leaning against Hilda's lemonade stand, watched them as they sat
chattering in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their
tongues.

"Look at them over there," he whispered, detaining Clara as she passed
him. "Aren't they the Old Guard? I've just counted thirty hands. I guess
they've wrung many a chicken's neck and warmed many a boy's jacket for
him in their time."

In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the
children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn
out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. Clara
Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away.
Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went toward the house.
He watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender,
defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of
blue-black hair. "No," he reflected; "she'd never be like them, not if
she lived here a hundred years. She'