"Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What does it matter who does a thing, so it's done?"
Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura's last remark, which had not sounded very sensible to her--of course it mattered who did things; why, that sometimes was all that did matter!--and reflected that, country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on one's clothes.
But Laura's hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott's standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and berries and fruits. Elliott hadn't meant to look so fixedly at Laura's hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, "If you prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine into too many pies ever to have them look well."
"They're a lovely shape," said Elliott, seriously.
And then, to her amazement, Laura laughed and leaned over and hugged her. "And you're a dear thing, even if you do think my hands are no lady's!"
Of course Elliott protested; but as that was just what she did think, her protestations were not very convincing.
"You can't have everything," said Laura, quite as though she didn't mind in the least what her hands looked like. The strangest part of it all was that Elliott believed Laura actually didn't mind.
But she didn't know how to answer her, Laura's words had raised the dust on all those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott had had sitting about in her mind for so long that she supposed they were her very own opinions. Until the dust settled she couldn't tell what she thought, whether they belonged to her or had simply been dumped on her by other people. She couldn't remember ever having been in such a position before.