Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/63

 sex matters. At school she ignored the small dirtiness that lurks wherever many children are gathered together.

From her own and the neighbors' barnyards Judith had picked up all the profanity and obscenity that is a part of the life of such places, and she used it freely, joyously and unashamedly. Bill's mild remonstrances, "What kind o' talk is that for a little gal?" and the horror of the twins had no effect upon her.

"I should suttenly think shame to myse'f, Judy, if I was you," Lizzie May would say, "to talk that air way. What makes you go fer to do it?"

"Well, Craw talks that way, an' the Blackford boys does, an' dad does too when he's with other men. I ain't no diff'rent from them."

"In course you're diff'rent; you're a gal."

"Well, anyway, I don't feel like one," Judy would answer unrepentantly.

If she could have put into words what she vaguely felt, she would have said that the language of the barnyard was an expression of something that was real, vital and fluid, that it was of natural and spontaneous growth, that it turned with its surroundings, that it was a part of the life that offered itself to her. The prim niceness of the twins, suitable enough to them in the world that they were making for themselves, was for her a deadening negation of life. To have to be correct and decent in her speech was the same as being forced to sit motionless on a straight-backed chair in the front room when she was consumed with a longing to run and jump and whoop and chase the dog and play at "Hide and Seek" around the barn.

Craw was at home now and able to help his father. But the plans that Bill had made in the invigorating coolness of early spring did not bear much fruit. It was one thing to plan work and quite another thing to do it when the dog days came and the sun baked the hillsides. Then as he hoed out weeds or followed the cultivator in the heat of the day, and the sweat rolled down his body in scalding streams, he felt less enthusiastic about raising a big tobacco crop. Indeed,