Looking up she saw the tall Pilgrim monument towering over the town like
a watchful giant. She had a feeling that it, too, was spying on her. No
matter where she went, even away out in the harbor in a motor boat, it
was always stretching its long neck up to watch her. Shaking back her
curls, she looked up at it defiantly and made a face at it, just the
ugliest pucker of a face she could twist her little features into.

But it was only on rare occasions that Georgina felt the longing for
playmates of her own age. Usually she was busy with her lessons or
happily following her mother and Mrs. Triplett around the house, sharing
all their occupations. In jelly-making time she had the scrapings of the
kettle to fill her own little glass. When they sewed she sewed with them,
even when she was so small that she had to have the thread tied in the
needle's eye, and could do no more than pucker up a piece of soft goods
into big wallops. But by the time she was nine years old she had learned
to make such neat stitches that Barbara sent specimens of her needlework
back to Kentucky, and folded others away in a little trunk of keepsakes,
to save for her until she should be grown.

Abo by the time she was nine she could play quite creditably a number of
simple Etudes on the tinkly old piano which had lost some of its ivories.
Her daily practicing was one of the few things about which Barbara was
strict. So much attention had been given to her own education in music
that she found joy in keeping up her interest in it, and wanted to make
it one of Georgina's chief sources of pleasure. To that end she mixed the
stories of the great operas and composers with her fairy tales and folk
lore, until the child knew them as intimately as she did her Hans
Andersen and Uncle Remus.