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 .
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