"Bless your heart, chile," cried the old woman; "you didn't tell him that now, did you? You mustn't make the old darky too proud!"
She did not enter with quite as much enthusiasm into Kate's description of the threshing machine, and reverted with a sigh to the days when the thresher was content with his flail, an instrument which she extolled as being "a heap safer than that great snorting machine" (she persisted in confounding its functions with those of the engine); and she refused to share in Kate's wonder that people didn't starve in those days waiting for the grain to be threshed.
The two were still discussing harvests past and present when Esther, feeling that she had done her full duty there, left the kitchen. She had never held quite the place in Milly's affections which Kate enjoyed, nor had she of late years listened with her sister's contentment to the old woman's thrice-told tales. She left them now and went to seek her mother.
Mrs. Northmore was seated on the cool veranda with her hands in her lap, and that look of tired content which tells of a busy but successful day. A generous hospitality had left her a little worn. Esther sat down on the step at her feet and leaned her arms across her lap in a childish fashion she had never outgrown.
"I wish I didn't get so tired of people whom I really like," she said. "It would break Aunt Milly's heart if she knew how she bores me. It seems to me sometimes I get tired of everybody--everybody but you, mother dear."
Mrs. Northmore looked into her daughter's eyes with a smile.
"I don't think I should feel hurt, my dear, if you wanted to get away from me, too, sometimes. Nobody quite suits all our moods. I wouldn't reproach myself on that score, if I were you."
"But it seems so disloyal, when it's anybody--anybody that you really care a great deal about," said Esther. Her mother's smile kept its tinge of amusement, and the girl's face grew more serious.
"I wonder sometimes if I'm made like other girls," she said. "It isn't just getting tired of people. It's getting tired of things in general, and longing for something larger than anything that comes into my life. I don't know as I can make you understand quite what I mean," she went on, a strained note creeping into her voice, "but somehow it came over me to-day more strongly than it ever did before that I could never be satisfied just to live out my life in the common humdrum way. Perhaps it was the talk of those women. I suppose they're just as good and useful as the average, but it seemed as if they thought there was nothing in the world for women to do but to be married, and keep house, and take care of children. Even Mrs. Elwell, nice as she is, appeared to think so, and it all seemed to me so poor and small. I almost despised them, mother."