Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Somebody had always been explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so industriously that she had never found out a single thing for herself before.

The house waited emptily with her for the answer which did not come.

It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard before.

She was rarely quiet enough to hear that sound, but when it did come to her ears, it always said pressingly, “So much to do! So much to do! So much to do!”

And that was the arrival of Elizabeth Ann at Putney Farm.

She was like a falcon in a barnyard.

They certainly believed in being saving of their words at Putney Farm.

Nobody could put in a pin with her gesture of mastery.

Aunt Abigail’s great body was like a stove.

“It’s the clock that is the naysayer to life,” he thought, as he climbed the cellar stairs.

A dim notion was growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn’t.

No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishcloths.

If there is anything horrid that an examination didn’t do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to hear of it.

Sympathy for childhood nothing! If he felt any real sympathy for his own children, he’d somehow get more money to give them.

Not a thing had happened the way she had planned; no, not a single thing! But it seemed to her she had never been so happy in her life.

“I never saw one of my children just living before,” he meditated.

Aunt Abigail stood there, in her night cap, mountainous in her long white gown, a candle shining up into her serious old face.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!”

It was like flinging herself into a featherbed.

He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it.