Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/52

 "You'll have to hear a good many surprising things before you're as old as I be," she answered, tranquilly resuming her spectacles and her knitting-work.

The canary, as though startled by his old friend's heresy, had fallen into a sudden silence. For a little while the click of the knitting-needles and Betsy's soft woolly manipulations were the only sounds audible.

Then Old Lady Pratt said: "How would it do to send Lucy away on a visit? May be Jane could have her at her house for a spell."

Jane was a daughter of the house of Pratt who had married somewhat "beneath her." She lived in a smoky manufacturing town about ten miles distant from the genteel suburb where the Pratts "resided." Her husband was an optician in a small way, who had not made a success of life, and one would have supposed that there was not much in the nature of festivity to be enjoyed in Jane's stuffy little house. But there was a theory in the Pratt family that a visit must necessarily be considered as an indulgence, and Harriet answered, with decision:

"No, Mother, I've no idea of humorin' her; she don't deserve it. And besides," she added, "it is n't likely 't would do any good. You know it was just what you tried with Jane herself, and after all she married Henry Bennett before the year was out."

"We'll let by-gones be by-gones," said Old