Explore "Courage" by Ruth Ogden on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It took such a very little while for Courage to feel perfectly contented and at home on the boat, that she was more than half inclined to take herself to task for a state of things which would seem to imply disloyalty to Mary Duff. As for Sylvia, she felt at home from the very first minute, and was constantly brimming over with delight. Nor was Larry far below the general level of happiness, for work seemed almost play with Courage ever at his side. As for Larry's boy, Dick, of a naturally mournful turn of mind, he too seemed carried along, quite in spite of himself, on the tide of prevailing high spirits. On more than one occasion he was known to laugh outright at some of Sylvia's remarkable performances, though always, it must be confessed, in deprecatory fashion, as though conscious of a perceptible loss of dignity. And who would not have been happy in that free, independent life they were leading! To be sure, there were discomforts. Sometimes, when the lighter was tied to a steaming Wharf all day, the sun would beat mercilessly down upon them, but then they could always look forward to the cool evening-out upon the water; and so happily it seemed to be in everything -- a hundred delights to offset each discomfort. Even for Larry and Dick, when work was hardest and weather warmest, there was a sure prospect of the yellow pitcher of iced tea, which Courage never failed to bring midway in the long morning, and then at the end of the day the leisurely, comfortable dinner, for they were quite aristocratic in their tastes, this little boat's company.
No noon dinner for them, with Larry in workaday clothes and the stove in the tiny kitchen piping its hottest at precisely the hour when its services could best be dispensed with, but a leisurely seven-o'clock dinner, with the lighter anchored off shore, and when, as a rule, Dick also had had time to "tidy up," and could share the meal with them. And in this, you see, they were not aristocratic at all. Even little black Sylvia had a seat at one side of the table, which she occupied as continuously as her culinary duties would admit.