From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
It is lovely and warm here and Alma and I are out of doors all day. Mrs. Martin never comes out of the farm house except for a few minutes as she must stay in the kitchen and help cook for all the farm hands. All the men who work on the farm eat breakfast, lunch and dinner here. They eat on long tables under the trees like a real picnic, only they don’t seem to know it’s a picnic. They don’t laugh or have any fun, they just eat. Mrs. Martin is very beautiful. She is pink and white. That is, her skin is very white and her cheeks and lips are pink and her hair is golden and she came from Denmark. She is the prettiest thing on the farm. Nothing in the house is pretty. I think the house is ugly although it smells clean, like fresh baked yeast rolls and angel cake. The parlor is full of slippery black chairs and red velvet footstools and the walls are covered with pictures of terribly ugly people. All of them are relations of Mr. and Mrs. Martin. The women all look as if they had been stuffed into their dresses and the men look as if they would like to take their collars off. There are some younger people on the mantle. There are girls in fluffy shirt waists and fluffy pompadours and tiny waists and tennis racquets but they don’t look as if they know how to play tennis. There are some ornaments in the room too, not such pretty ones as Grandmother has but I think Claire would like them. There is a little baby shoe. It was a real one once but Mrs. Martin had it made into a bronze so it would never wear out so she could keep it forever. Claire couldn’t break that even if she dropped it.