Page:Dorothy Canfield - Understood Betsy.djvu/16

4 their family. But "anything but the Putneys!" said Aunt Harriet, a great many times. They were related only by marriage to her, and she had her own opinion of them as a stiffnecked, cold-hearted, undemonstrative, and hard set of New Englanders. "I boarded near them one summer when you were a baby, Frances, and I shall never forget the way they were treating some children visiting there! . . . Oh, no, I don't mean they abused them or beat them . . . but such lack of sympathy, such perfect indifference to the sacred sensitiveness of child-life, such a starving of the child-heart. . . . No, I shall never forget it! They had chores to do . . . as though they had been hired men!"

Aunt Harriet never meant to say any of this when Elizabeth Ann could hear, but the little girl's ears were as sharp as little girls' ears always are, and long before she was nine she knew all about the opinion Aunt Harriet had of the Putneys. She did not know, to be sure, what "chores" were, but she took