Belles on their Toes

they were glad she liked it, and that they were headed home.
    Ernestine rejoined her friend, who hadn't seemed to be paying much attention.
    "They're my brothers," she said defensively. "At least the two boys are. We're going to have a vegetable garden."
    "That stuff will make it grow," he nodded. "We use it on our lawn."
    "It sure will," Ernestine agreed.
    "It's much better than the commercial kind."
    "It sure is," she nodded.
    "You might tell them we passed some of it back there a ways. Didn't you notice?"
    "I don't think so," said Ernestine. "Anyway, they've got plenty of it already."
    "It seems a shame to miss it. It gets more expensive every year."
    Ernestine and her friend continued down the street. She wondered how romance was supposed to flourish for any member of a family with so many younger brothers. She wondered why, with all the topics of conversation in the world to choose from, they had to end up on that one.

    Before Mother came home from the hospital, Ernestine warned the boys not to mention how they got the fertilizer. She thought Mother had enough on her mind without worrying about the fact that almost every one of her friends in town must have seen Frank and Bill making the rounds with their cart.
    But the soil did look fine and rich, and it was one of the first things Mother noticed.
    "Where in the world did you get that lovely fertilizer?" she asked. "I didn't see any check stub made out for that."
    "It's a long story," said Ernestine. "It seems that Tom has certain friends."
    "I guess you'd better not tell me," Mother smiled. "I have an idea it's one of those things that the less I know about, the better I'll feel."
    "Have you ever heard of Pegasus?" Ernestine asked brightly. "Well, once upon a time…"
    "Never mind, dear," Mother interrupted. "I saw the box on the express wagon."
    "It won't happen again," Ernestine promised. "And you ought to see all that's left over, out by the back fence."
    Mother thought the garden was a wonderful idea. The seeds started to come up before long. The jobs of weeding and cultivating were added by Ernestine and Martha to our work assignment charts, and we were fairly faithful about them.
    We may not have got best results because, as the agriculture bulletins pointed out, manure is supposed to be aged before it is applied as fertilizer. But we did, at least, get good results. There were corn, beans, peas, carrots, tomatoes, beets, kale, and lettuce. The girls canned some of them for winter use.
    Later we got a dozen hens, and that cut expenses some more, and helped solve the fertilization problem for future years. Fred and Dan thought it would solve the problem altogether if we should buy a pony, but the older ones reluctantly vetoed that idea.
    Tom named and made pets of the hens, and they'd follow him around the yard and jump up and perch on his finger. When their laying lagged, he'd make a show of spiking their mash with Quinine Remedy. The results after such dosings were spectacular. The poultry bulletins, which we also had written for, said the most you could expect from a dozen hens was eight or ten eggs a day. Sometimes we’d find twenty-five or thirty eggs in the nests when we got home from school.
    Sometimes, too, we'd see empty, store-bought egg containers poking out from under old newspapers in the kitchen wastebasket. We didn't want to spoil Tom's joke. When he wasn't looking, we pushed them down out of sight.

16
THEN THERE WERE TEN

    Anne fell in love with a doctor at the University of Michigan and this time it was the real thing. She wrote Mother that she had an engagement ring, and that her fiancé expected to go into practice soon. He was a few years older than she. He had to work pretty hard, and she didn't have a chance to see as much of him as either of them would like.
    Anne didn't say so, but she wasn't interested in college any more. She was interested only in getting married. But she felt she had obligations to the family, and she didn't want to do anything that would upset Mother.
    She was moody and nervous when she returned home for spring vacation. She spent a good deal of time in her room, writing special delivery letters. And she didn't look up any of her friends in Montclair.
    Mother's nose had turned out as handsomely as she had predicted, and she was back, full-time, on the grindstone again. But now she was concerned about Anne, who didn't seem to want to confide in anyone.
    "I know what it's like," Mother said one night,