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 . . . well . . . wait . . .  I suppose you want to be like Mrs. Wicket?”

“No, I don’t,” said Anna.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Barly, in a shaking voice, “yes . . . wait . . . you’ll see a bit of something . . . a taste of the broom, perhaps. . . .”

While the two women looked after the house, the hired men worked in the fields, under the hot sun, their wet, cotton shirts open at the neck, their faces shaded with wide straw hats.  Farmer Barly leaned against one side of a tumbled-down wooden fence, and old Mr. Crabbe against the other.

“This year,” said Farmer Barly, “I’m going to put up a silo in my barn.  And instead of straw to cover it, I’m going to plant oats on top.”

“Go along,” said Mr. Crabbe.

“Well, it’s a fact,” said Mr. Barly.  “I’m building now, back of the cows.”

“Digging, you might say,” corrected Mr. Crabbe.

“Building, by God,” said Mr. Barly.

Mr. Crabbe tilted back his head and cast a look of wonder at the sky.  “A hole is a hole,” he said finally.

“So it is,” agreed Mr. Barly, “so it is.  It takes a Republican to find that out.”  And, greatly amused at his own wit, Mr. Barly, who was a Democrat, slapped his knee and burst out laughing.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Crabbe solemnly, with pious joy, “I’m a Republican . . . a good Republican, Mr. Barly, like my father before me.”  He smote his fist into his open palm.  “I’ll vote the Democrats blue in the face.  If a man can’t vote for his own advantage, what’s the ballot for?  I say let’s mind our own business.  And let me get my hands on what I want.”

“Get what you can,” said Mr. Barly.

“And the devil take the hindmost.”

“It’s all the same to me,” quoth Mr. Barly, “folks being mostly alike as two peas.”

Mr. Crabbe spat into the stubble.  “The way I look at it,” he said, “it’s like this:  first, there’s me; and then there’s you.  That’s the way I look at it, Mr. B.”

And he went home to repeat to his wife what he had said to Farmer Barly.  “I gave it to him,” he declared.

In another field, Abner and John Henry, who had been to war, also discussed politics.  They agreed that the pay they received for their work was inadequate.  It seemed to them to be the fault of the government, which was run for the benefit of others besides themselves.