Though it was morning, with the day scarcely started, she turned tiredly
to the stove. Joe sat down to await the meal she would give him. This
was summer. Their ham, bacon, sausage, and other smoked meats, had long
since been exhausted. Not until the advancing season brought weather
cold enough to keep meat would they have any except the wild things they
shot. Expertly, Emma mixed milk with eggs and scrambled them in a
skillet. She laid slices of homemade bread on the stove until they
toasted, and lathered the toast thickly with home-churned butter.
Flushed with sleep, Barbara emerged from the room where she slept with
her sister and went outside to the well. When she came back, freshly
washed, she had seen the havoc wrought by the cows. She looked at her
mother's face, and at her father's, and was tactfully silent. She was
young and healthy, and, in spite of the disaster, she looked radiant,
and for some reason that he could not explain, Joe felt better.
Elemental himself, he thought of elemental things. Though he could not
have explained it, part of the awe Barbara inspired in him sprang from
the fact that she was a lovely young woman in whom, symbolically, all
the hope of the future lay. Certainly, without her, there could be no
future. Joe started eating the heaping plate of scrambled eggs and toast
that Emma gave him, and he was half through his meal when there was a
timid knock at the door.