split under their fingers, click, cluck; the peas fell into the bowl
like shot at first, dull as the bowl grew full. Click, cluck, click,
cluck . . . Anna began to dream again. "Oh, do wake up," said her
mother; "one would think . . ."

Anna's hands went startled into the peas. "I must be in love," she
said with half a smile.

Mrs. Barly sighed. "Ak," she said.

Anna began to laugh. After a while she asked, "Do you think I'm in
love?"

"Like as not," said her mother.

"Well, then," Anna cried, "I'm not in love at all--not now."

Mrs. Barly let her fingers rest idly along the rim of the bowl. "When
I was a girl . . ." she began. Then it was Anna's turn to sigh.

"It seems like yesterday," remarked Mrs. Barly, who wanted to say, "I
am still a young woman."

Anna split pods gravely, her eyes bent on her task. The tone of her
mother's voice, tart and dry, filled her mind with the sulky thoughts
of youth. "There's fewer alive to-day," she said, "than when you were
a girl."

Mrs. Barly knew very well what her daughter meant. "Be glad there's
any left," she replied, as she turned again to her shelling.

Anna's round, brown finger moved in circles through the peas. "I'm too
young to marry," she said, at last.

"No younger than what I was."

But it seemed to Anna as though life had changed since those days. For
every one was reaching for more. And Anna, too, wanted more . . . more
than her mother had had. "If I wait," she said in a low voice,
"to . . . see a bit of life . . . what's the harm?"

The pod in Mrs. Barly's hand cracked with a pop, and trembled in the
air, split open like the covers of a book. "I declare," she exclaimed,
"I don't know what to think . . . well . . . wait . . . I suppose you
want to be like Mrs. Wicket?"

"No, I don't," said Anna.

"Yes," said Mrs. Barly, in a shaking voice, "yes . . . wait . . .
you'll see a bit of something . . . a taste of the broom,
perhaps. . . ."

While the two women looked after the house, the hired men worked in the
fields, under the hot sun, their wet, cotton shirts open at the neck,
their faces shaded with wide straw hats. Farmer Barly leaned against
one side of a tumbled-down wooden fence, and old Mr. Crabbe against the
other.

"This year," said Farmer Barly, "I'm going to put up a silo in my barn.
And instead of straw to cover it, I'm going to plant oats on top."

"Go along," said Mr. Crabbe.

"Well, it's a fact," said Mr. Barly.