Page:Bobbie, General Manager (1913).djvu/17

Rh friends wrote to him; besides, when he came home for Christmas he always had a pocketful of kodak pictures to show us of his life in the West. They weren't all taken in the lumber camps. Some were snapshots of house-parties, which he'd been on, and I assure you, I always took in the expensive background of these pictures—carved stone doorways, perfectly elegant houses, lawns kept like a park, and automobiles with chauffeurs sitting up as stiff as ramrods. I hadn't much doubt, when Tom wrote that he was engaged to be married to Miss Elise Hildegarde Parmenter, but that she was an inmate of one of these millionaire mansions, and I was absolutely convinced of it when I laid eyes on her photograph—one of those brown carbons a foot square—and counted the six magnificent plumes on her big drooping picture-hat. I knew that 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass., would look pretty worn and dingy alongside Sunny-lawn-by-the-Lake, which was engraved in gold letters and hyphens at the top of Miss Parmenter's heavy grey note-paper.

The minute Tom wrote that he was going to bring his elegant bride to Hilton I button-holed Father and Alec one day after dinner, and told those two men that the house had simply got to be done over. It was disgraceful as it was; it hadn't been painted since I could remember; it was unworthy of our name. Father reminded me that the reason none of us went to the wedding (Tom was married in California, on Elise's father's orange ranch) was to save expense, as I already knew, and merely to paint the house would cost the price of a ticket or two.

"Let us be ourselves, Lucy," said Father to me,