"Uh-h," Letty grunted, and held up her small brown hand, the ant a black smear on her palm.
"Why, Letty!" Catherine pulled herself up on one elbow. "You squashed him!"
Catherine reached for Letty's fist just as a pink tongue touched it.
"Going to eat him, are you? Little anteater." She brushed the ant away and rolled her daughter over into her arm. "You might wait until you are nipped."
Letty chuckled and lay quietly for a minute, while Catherine looked at her. Brown legs and arms, yellow rompers, yellow hair with sun streaks of palest gold, blue eyes squinted in mirth, a round and sturdy chin.
Catherine closed her eyes again. Out from the woods behind them came with the lengthening shadows the odor of sun-warmed firs and dried needles. Quiet--release from heat--from thought.
Suddenly Letty squirmed, pounded her heels vigorously against her mother's knee, rolled over, and began her own method of standing up. Her process consisted of a slow elevation of her rear, until she had made a rounded pyramid of herself. She stood thus, looking gravely around, her hands flat on the rug, her sandaled feet wide apart.
"Hurry up, anteater," jeered Catherine. "You'll have vertigo."
But Letty took her time. Finally erect, she started off across the meadow.
"Here, you!" Catherine sat up. "Where you going?"
"Get Daddy." Letty's voice, surprisingly deep, bounced behind her.
"Wait for me." Catherine stretched to her feet, reluctantly.
Letty would not have waited, except that she stumbled into an ant hill hidden in the long grass, and went down plump on her stomach. So she lay there calmly, turning her head turtle-wise to watch her mother.
Catherine had borne three children without adding a touch of the matron to her slender, long body. In knickers and green smock, her smooth brown hair dragging its heavy coil low down her slim neck, she looked young and strong and like the birch tree under which she stood. There was even the same suggestion of quiet which a breath might dispel, of poise which might at a moment tremble into agitation. The suggestion lay in her long gray eyes, with eagerness half veiled by thin lids and dark lashes, or perhaps in the long, straight lips, too firmly closed.
A shout came up the path between the alders, and Letty scrambled to her feet.