Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/211

 was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home Nest:

"Here you've got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their lives—practically—and though Mother does have her sick-headaches, that's to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while her father, the old deacon—and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our present prosperity—BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I've always thought—"

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

"I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My Jewels—I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses, don't you?—but that's what they really are to their mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished— Of course when we'd started giving them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we'd started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase—it is Chrysoprase, isn't it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the girls are getting quite famous—their pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies' Baseball Team all our own—only the Doctor has to play on it now, because I'm beginning to get a little stout."

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y. W. C. A. or the Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.