Before Mart's experience, her knowledge of the sea and boats, her background of seafaring ancestors, her easy assurance, Sidney's pleasant sense of superiority soon went crash. Too, Mart revealed a quality of strongheartedness and a contentment with everything as it came along that amazed Sidney at the same time that it put her own restlessness to shame. Why, Mart, in all her life, had never been farther than Falmouth and had gone there to a funeral, but she had none of Sidney's yearnings to "see places." Pressed by Sidney's inquiries she had answered, with a deceiving indifference: "Oh, what's the use of wanting to go anywhere, it's nice enough here." Nor did Mart's multitudinous tasks embarrass her; she would keep Sidney waiting while she finished scrubbing the kitchen floor. And she had a way of swishing her brush that made even this homely labor seem like play until Sidney, watching from the safety of a chair, her feet securely tucked between its rungs, longed to roll up her own sleeves and thrust her arms into the sudsy water. Martie had to work much harder than any girl Sidney had ever known or heard about; she did a man's work and a woman's work about her home and did not even think it was out of kindly proportion to her years. "Oh, there's just gran'ma and me and she has rheumatiz awful," she had explained just once to Sidney. That was why, of course, Martie looked so unkempt and overgrown and had had so little schooling, but Sidney came to think these shortcomings and their cause made Martie the more interesting. Though after a week Sidney could toss her head like Mart, run as fast, go barefooted, sprinkle her chatter with a colloquial slang that would have horrified the League, affect ignorance to anything schooly, she found that it was not easy to emulate Mart's fine independence. There was always that feeling of being tied to the things ingrained within her. Mart's ease with everyone, young or old, gave her, in Sidney's eyes, the desirable quality of grown-upness. Mart talked to the fishermen and the women who were her grandmother's friends and the artists and the tradespeople exactly as though she were their equal in point of years; Sidney, marvelling and admiring, did not know that this assurance was really a boldness that had grown naturally out of there just being "gran'ma and me." Martie had had to hold her own since she was six years old.