For the toil is sweet that I do for you."
She returns,
"Filling her basket with buttercup blooms
To put in the parlor and other rooms."
Buttercups in reaping time are, in the author's own words, "preciously rare." But the young woman is ambitious and goes about her drudgery,
"Putting up proud thoughts in the shape of dreams,
Lining the present with golden gleams."
"Putting up" is happy but very puzzling, suggesting a colloquialism.
She leans her head on the unmade spread and wants to go to college; but she can't.
"And the only books that float by her eyes
Are the sloping fields and the open skies."
This is very hard to comprehend. We see that the first line might refer to a family scrimmage. But nobody ever heard of a field - and a sloping field at that - floating by a girl's eyes; at least, in this part of the country.
"With her queenly brow and her sunburned hands
By the cooking-stove she silently stands,"
possibly finding it difficult to do so without them.
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Mr. Lawton's Reading.
