Phoebe and the Household Gods

HEN Phoebe came back from her first long visit, it was borne in upon the Martin family that they offended constantly in matters pertaining to etiquette and taste. Mrs. Martin's sympathy never ran thin—even at the hundredth repetition of the glories of the Warburton social circle. But the time came when the application to argumentative discussion of the word Marblehead produced on the male half of the family an effect far from soothing.

“Mother,” Ernest said once, “I hate to be called to grub by a vulgar dinner-bell. Can't you train the kitchen canary to announce our meals? Delia's stutter would put any vaudeville act on the fritz. Now, in Marblehead, the butler always sasshayed to the drawing-room door and whispered, 'Madame, the dinner is served!' Oh, Lizzie!”

And once, goaded beyond human endurance, Mr. Martin said, “Ernest, I prithee do not say, 'Chase the cow up to this end of the table!' In Marblehead, we always said, 'May I solicit the cream?'”

But, undaunted by the slings and arrows of an envious conservatism, Phoebe continued to hammer along the lines of esthetic reform. And Mrs. Martin continued to wonder for what all this maneuvering was preparation.

In Mrs. Martin's case, Phoebe's domestic muckraking had gone no farther than: “Mother Martin, this winter you've got to have some clothes. This putting every cent you can rake and scrape together on me has got to stop. You ought to see the way Mrs. Warburton dressed at Marblehead—my goodness! At least you ought to have one dress-up gown—a whole dress—a princess. That waist-and-skirt proposition has all gone out. It looks funny.”

But to Mrs. Martin's great relief—for economy was so instinctive with her now that spending money on herself seemed almost criminal—her daughter said nothing more about clothes. Indeed, on one pretext or another Phoebe herself postponed the inevitable shopping expedition.

Of all these things Mrs. Martin thought as she watched her husband and her daughter turn the corner and come up the drive together. At sight of them, Mrs. Martin's first subconscious comment was, “She's teasing him for something he don't want to give.” Her next, “How crazy those two are about each other!” was subconscious, too. None the less was it prideful and self-glorifying. For, in some vague, illogical way, this devotion seemed her handiwork. Her last came consciously and with a sigh. “I wonder what he'll say when she gets engaged? He'll never reconcile himself to it in this world.”

But the front door was open now, and Phoebe's well-pitched voice seemed to disperse the last wisp of the lurking Sunday stillness. “Let's talk it over with mother, father dear,” she said. In another moment, Mr. Martin had sunk into the morris-chair beside the fire with a long “A-a-ah!” of relief, and Phoebe had curled herself into another one of the big armchairs.

“Mother,” exclaimed Phoebe breathlessly, “I've been telling father how much I'd like to give a little dance—a cotillion—in the Playroom, I mean the Gym, on my birthday. It won't be any expense to him,” she threw in hastily, forefending [sic] criticism, “for I've saved up most of my allowance for six months and all the money I earned doing that brass-work in the summer. It will cost me very little, you see, because I'll have only ice cream and cake and Miss Peck will play the piano until twelve for five dollars. And you know, Mother Martin, it's about time that we did some entertaining—with father such an important man in the community and—and—besides—it would be nice for Ern if we could keep him in nights—and—and—make this house a sort of rendezvous for”

Mrs. Martin's whole face lighted up with a smile of real little-girl glee. She shook her hands with her characteristic gesture of delight. “I think it will be the greatest fun! Let's make out the list of invitations now.”

Phoebe gasped. It is always a shock, when you have prepared for battle involving terrific carnage, to achieve victory at the end of the first skirmish. She turned her back on her father as on a discredited ally, and she paid gallant tribute to her mother's readiness.

“Oh, Mother Martin, how you always do just what I don't expect!” She flew blithely to the desk and returned armed with pencils and paper. “Girls first,” she began.

“Molly Tate, the Gould twins, Margaret Farnum and Janet Dodge,” Mrs. Martin rattled off at Phoebe's own breakneck speed.

“Marian Ordway,” Phoebe took it up. “Oh, yes, and Augusta Pugh.”

“Oh, you Gussie!” gibed Ernest, who had tumbled into the room, drawn downstairs by some powerful psychological suction. “Gee, I'm glad you're inviting her! For if Gussie comes, it's the barn for mine.”

“Who else did you say, mother?” Phoebe spent not the flicker of an eyelash on this interruption. But in another instant, she added casually: “I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'll invite you, Ern Martin, at all. Remember this is my party. Oh, and of course, father, I want to invite all the girls in your office—I never shall forget how sweet they were to me that time I went in to work. Then there's Florence Marsh.” Phoebe bent to her pencil-point.

For an instant the room was silent. Then Mr. and Mrs. Martin spoke simultaneously.

“I thought Florence was away,” Mrs. Martin said. And, “What's your idea in inviting Florence Marsh?” Mr. Martin said. “She never comes here.”

Unwittingly, Phoebe had flicked her father on the raw. It was a source of private indignation with Mr. Martin that Mrs. Martin had never been properly appreciated in Maywood. At first she had been too poor, and always she had been too busy, to take any important place in their pleasant little community. Maywood boasted a Woman's Club which she had never thought of joining and a Whist Club which she had never been invited to enter. Mrs. Marsh, the richest woman in town, divided its social leadership with Mrs. Warburton, a representative of its most distinguished family. Mrs. Warburton, with whom Phoebe was a great favorite, had always been “neighborly,” but Mrs. Marsh had never stepped foot inside their house. Marsh himself was a pleasant, democratic sort of person with whom Mr. Martin had been forced into social relations. Wednesday night, for instance, the committee of which Marsh was chairman and Mr. Martin a member would meet at the Marsh house. Mr. Martin knew that the wives of the other committeemen would, by special invitation, be spending the evening with Mrs. Marsh, in the intimate seclusion of their hostess's upstairs sitting-room. Mr. Martin had to attend these functions—duty required that—but he had never got over the hurt of knowing that certain doors, open in a sense to him, remained closed to his wife. He had not spoken of the matter to Mrs. Martin. Sometimes he wondered what she thought of it all.

“Oh, Ive got to,” Phoebe was saying casually. “Didn't I tell you, mother, that Florence and I were great chums in Marblehead?”

Mrs. Martin dropped her pencil and looked at Phoebe over her glasses. “You mentioned meeting her.”

“I saw her every single day,” Phoebe explained with calmness. “She was staying at the most beautiful old place in Salem and she came to that first tea that Mrs. Warburton gave for me. She seemed to take the greatest fancy to me—rushed me like everything. And I liked her ever so much. She's not very pretty or very brilliant, but she's a dandy girl.”

This was Phoebe. In her social game, she alternated canny calculation with an unexpected innocence of the importance of her conquests. She would have told you that her real “crush” of the summer had been for Sylvia Gordon, who was paying her way through college by waiting on table at the hotel.

“The only trouble,” Phoebe rippled on, “is that Mrs. Marsh will surely come if Florence does. She has an idea that a girl ought to be chaperoned every moment of the time. It makes Florence perfectly crazy.”

Mrs. Martin spoke first, and her voice had the uncharacteristic dryness of emphasis.

“I wouldn't bother about that. Neither Florence nor her mother will come here.”

“Oh, yes, they'll come, all right,” Phoebe disagreed lightly. “In fact, I met Florence yesterday and asked her if she'd be a 'floater'—that's a girl who helps you to get things started at teas and functions of all sorts—and she said that she was just crazy to do anything she could. My goodness, is that the October 'Ladies Household Guide'? Why didn't somebody tell me when I've just been on pins and needles waiting for it to come?”

Under cover of the family conversation, always dully statistical without her mental eagerness and her forthrightness of expression to whirl it along, Phoebe whipped through the magazine. The head of one of the back pages—GIRLS' PROBLEMS—stopped her. Her pink finger-tip ran swiftly down the column of small-type answers to correspondents, and paused at an item near the bottom.

“Mother,” Phoebe said casually, coming into her mother's room to be kissed good night, “haven't you a box full of old lace somewhere that Aunt Mary left you? I wish you'd get it out to-morrow and let me look at it. And by the way, mother, to-morrow we'll go in and get that new gown of yours.”

The evening of the following Wednesday, Phoebe threw another bomb into the family circle. “Father,” she said, after an interval of silence during which she studied his gala attire, “do you know that you need some new evening-clothes?”

“A new swallow-tail!” Mr. Martin ejaculated. And he said it in the tone of one who sees the sway and anticipates the crash of his dearest illusion. “What's the matter with this one?”

“Everything's the matter with it,” Phoebe said emphatically. “The tails are too long and the coat is too short and it hasn't a stripe along the seam of its trousers. You ought to have a white piqué waistcoat and that tie's the limit. How long have you had it, father?”

“Seventeen years,” Mr. Martin confessed. And he cringed.

“Seventeen years!” Phoebe repeated. And again, “Seventeen years!” She did not hurt her argument by further comment. But in her inflection, Mr. Martin read his doom.

“And while you're about it,” continued Phoebe, as though the matter were settled, “you might as well get some for Ern. It's time he had some. He's as big as he'll ever be—goodness knows we'll have to put a hole in the roof if he grows another inch. Ern'll sure be invited to lots of dances this winter—”

“And I'll go to them all—I don't think—nitsky,” interpolated Ernest.

“—and he ought to have the right thing to wear,” Phoebe went on, not turning a hair. “And when you do get some new clothes, father, do go and have your pictures taken. I'm sick and tired of having the Boston papers publish that fierce old effigy that they're always sticking in whenever you do anything.”

With a “I have spoken” air, Phoebe returned to her book.

“Is there anything else in a small way that you think you'd like?” Mr. Martin inquired. But into his voice had crept a certain flatness, the germ of that doubt which first festers, then gangrenes, then sends a man, hotfoot, to his tailor. The next Saturday he said peremptorily: “Ernest, you meet me at ten o'clock in the office. I'm going round to order a new swallow-tail and you might as well get measured, too.”

For the next two days, Phoebe contributed little to the family history. Indeed, her manner was informed with an unfamiliar conservatism, her aspect exuded a dovelike mildness. But on the third night she dropped into the peaceable domestic group what proved the highest explosive yet.

“Father,” she said in her most winning tones, “do you know it's time that you bought Mother Martin some new furniture?”

“New furniture! Mr. Martin repeated in a dazed tone. “New furniture! Phoebe,” he demanded scathingly, “how is it that you manage to exist in such a low-brow circle?”

“Now, father dear, don't get cross,” Phoebe remonstrated. She deposited herself in Mr. Martin's lap and rubbed her smooth cheek against his. “Please, don't be sarcastic, because that frightens me. I want to talk reasonably with you. I may be wrong lots of times, but this time I know I'm right. It is time we had some new furniture. Don't you think so, mother?”

Mrs. Martin was torn with conflicting allegiances. For Mrs. Martin did think so. Emphatically she thought so. She had never thought anything else. In point of fact, Mrs. Martin had never considered that she had any furniture. She and her husband had married on almost nothing. The few sticks of things which they bought at first had been augmented by a legacy of furniture from her Aunt Mary. At the time, it had seemed a godsend. But in the early years of her married life, Mrs. Martin longed intensely for the plush and mirrored “sets” of her generation of brides. In the twenty-odd years of their marriage, there had always been something to eat into their savings. After the children were born, they decided to buy the Esdaile place. It was a beautifully built house, big for those days and for these even, but a great bargain, and they had never regretted the half dozen cramping years that followed. Then came the stable, a horse and carriage, the automobile. Always there was the insurance and the fund for Ernest's college education. The Martins were fairly well-to-do now. There were two maids in the house. Mrs. Martin had a liberal housekeeping allowance. In fact, the economical tension had relaxed all along the line.

Although Mrs. Martin did not know it and Phoebe could never have suspected it, the house was in admirable if quiet taste, because it adjusted itself so closely to the needs of its tenants. True, the rooms were big, square, a little unmitigated. But Mrs. Martin was the kind of woman for whom green things love to grow. Everywhere ivies, ferns, and feathery, drooping plants softened the gauntness of the walls. The furniture was all dignified and simple, the mahogany, although they did not know it, exceptional, the few old engravings excellent examples of their school. Economy had prevented Mrs. Martin from acquiring the clutter of foolish bric-à-brac which would have put all these fine effects to shame. In fact, everything, though not especially decorative, was good of its kind, useful and used.

Swayed equally by the claims of sentiment and the joys of acquisitiveness, Mrs. Martin asked non-committally, “Well, what are you thinking of doing?”

“Well, in the first place, I want to get rid of all that old truck of Aunt Mary's,” Phoebe said emphatically and with unhesitating decision.

Phoebe's mentality resembled nothing so much as a roll-top desk. It was full of big drawers and little drawers, convenient pigeon-holes and broad, flat shelves. Every opinion Phoebe had—and she had one on every conceivable subject—was neatly tied up, labeled and filed away. Phoebe could put her hand on any one of them at an instant's notice.

Again Mrs. Martin fenced. And, a little, she bristled. “What truck?” she asked.

“Well, for instance, those black-walnut bookcases. “They're such lumbering, high, hideous things. Nobody has poky old stuff like that nowadays. All the furniture is—well, sort of heavy but airy, if you know what I mean. Oh, mother, if you could only see Mrs. Warburton's place in Marblehead—”

Ernest groaned ostentatiously. Mr. Martin reached for a book. Mrs. Martin had a sudden impulse to take up the cudgels for Aunt Mary's lares against the Warburton penates. But another impulse silenced her. For, all through Phoebe's discontent sounded the voice of the Coming Generation. And Mrs. Martin recognized it. Also, by that token, she knew that Aunt Mary, her goods and chattels, were doomed.

“—and other places she took me to—artists and people like that,” Phoebe was still racing on with her narrative. “I don't care for the artists' places, myself. They're too bare and messy. They stick up pictures with thumb-tacks—it looks like—just anywhere it occurs to them. They never have any frames on them. And they think the queerest, ugliest things are beautiful. What I mean is their studios aren't the least bit cozy. But there are some new houses I went into—oh, weren't they the crackajacks! Chockful of the loveliest, bright-looking, new, modern furniture. Every room done in a color. Now, for instance, mother, your room ought to be pink and mine yellow to go with our complexions. Everybody has bookcases built in nowadays and built low to put bric-à-brac on them. The stunt is to have everything on a level with the eye—search me why. And just slews and slathers and rafts of pictures, all little ones, just as few big ones as possible.”

Much of this was in accordance with Mrs. Martin's own observation. But, for the moment, it pleased her, as, axiomatically, it pleases the half-converted, to put obstacles in the way of a relentless progress. “What would you do with Aunt Mary's bookcases?” For the first time, Phoebe hesitated. And when Phoebe hesitated, the air always quivered with latent possibilities.

“Put them in Ern's room,” Ernest broke in with an ominous falsetto imitation of his sister's treble. “Mother, if you let Phoeb' Martin dump those old coffins in my room, I'll chop them up for kindling-wood. Look what's in there now! Everything that nobody else wants—two trunks, two bureaus, a broken table, and every chair that's ever got smashed since I was born. Tug asked me once if you got my furniture at a rummage sale.”

Ernest had interrupted Phoebe just in time. “Ern's room,” had so choked in her throat that she had, finally, to swallow it. “I'd either sell them or put them in the stable, mother,” she said as one inspired. “Now that will be about all from you, Ern Martin. You know that if I've offered to fix your room up once, I've offered a million times.”

“Gee, and a grand job you'd make of it,” Ernest countered offensively. “Tidies and all kinds of dinky, footless girl-stuff everywhere.”

“We are talking about something that doesn't concern you, Ern Martin, in the least, and which you could not possibly understand if it did. Now what I want for the house, mother, is—” and for the first time, Phoebe really let herself go. “I think,” she concluded at the end of the most eloquent quarter of an hour of her life, “now that you and father have reached the time of life when you can afford such comforts, there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't have them. Now is there?”

Mrs. Martin, overcome by this oral flood, could not answer. But Mr. Martin, less susceptible to the claims of the Coming Generation, took it by the forelock. “That furniture is good enough for your mother and me, Phoebe,” he said, “and I guess you'll have to put up with it a little while longer.”

Superficially, it seemed as if the matter were settled. But when the Coming Generation allies itself with a Latent Maternal Ambition, something is sure to break. So, a few nights later, Ernest Martin, dashing into the house just ahead of the dinner-bell, came upon a pale and exhausted Phoebe stretched out on the library couch.

“Ern Martin, if I haven't put in a day,” she began. “They bought everything that I wanted in the end—all except one plush chair, shaped like a letter S, that mother said she'd always wanted and was going to have now if she didn't have another thing. I guess you'll show some signs of excitement, Ern Martin, when I tell you that I got them to buy a whole new set for your room. Yes, sir—curly birch and a corker! And you can just thank me, for I never worked so hard for anything in my life. I got father to buy you one of those high chiffoniers—the kind Tug has at Harvard—all kinds of drawers in it and a peachy mirror. I think they're great—they're so manny. And they're going to sell all the tumbledown truck—that is, all except Aunt Mary's things. Mother says she'd as soon think of selling one of us as that—you know how funny she is about anything that's been in the family—darling, old duck! But she's agreed to put them in the stable! It wasn't so bad with father—you know there's one thing about father—you can tire him out. But mother held back on everything. Why, she actually turned pale when father began to loosen up. I thought at times she was going to cry.”

“Mother always does get cold feet when it comes to spending money,” Ernest remarked reflectively, “but father's the easiest thing on earth—once you get him going.”

“Maybe we haven't got to hustle though to get ready for that dance! For I just put it to father and mother coming home in the train that with all that new furniture they simply must have some painting and papering done. Father saw the sense of that immediately. So, now we've got to hold the furniture back until the house is ready. But I guess we'll make it—we've got a whole month!”

But a night's sleep could do much for Phoebe. The morning found her fresh, buoyant, the light of a new resolution shining in her eyes. “Father,” she began unhesitatingly at breakfast, “do you know that now that the house is being all fixed over, it does seem to me as if we ought to make more of a junction of this affair. You see it's almost in the nature of a house-warming. I really think, considering you're kind of a public man, that we ought to have engraved invitations and a caterer. And when you come to count up, we're really inviting almost everybody in Maywood. It seems to me that Miss Peck's music will seem rather funny for such a big dance.”

Mr. Martin fixed his daughter with a look in which suspicion had kindled exasperation. She returned it with a gaze of seraphic, star-eyed innocence.

“Phoebe,” he said at last, “I'll bring my bank-book home to-night and give it to you. You go ahead and do whatever you want, but don't you insult me again by pretending to consult me about anything.”

For a month, domestic anarchy reigned in the Martin household. Mrs. Martin said again and again that the house would never be finished in time. As it was, on the night of the dance, the last bit of furniture barely grazed the first incoming guest. But, even then, there was no hitch—the reins of government were too firmly clutched in Phoebe's slender brown hands.

After the light dinner, Phoebe sent her family to their rooms with the command to be ready for inspection in an hour. Alone, she made the final tour of the house. Now and again she called instructions to the struggling ones upstairs.

The place was almost unrecognizable. The big living-rooms, papered in a brilliant red cartridge and carpeted with Axminster rugs of rainbow dyes, bulged with heavy mission furniture. From the sideboard in the dining-room came the diamond glitter of new cut glass, the unrelieved glare of new silver. A plate-rail almost sagged under an accumulation of exotic china, copper and brass, and much-mottoed steins. The walls were hidden behind casts and pictures, many the passepartout work of Phoebe's own tireless fingers. Mrs. Martin had held out stubbornly for her plants. Phoebe had supplemented them with bowls of flowers. These, and the new, hospitably doorless, low bookcases, filled with Aunt Mary's fine old books, saved to the place some of its old-time flavor. Phoebe's face was one smile, as she looked about her.

“Don't anybody sit on the couch in the hall,” she commanded. “I've been fifteen minutes making the cushions look as if somebody had just been sitting there.”

Phoebe appeared in her brother's room a minute later with a framed photograph in her hand. “Now, Ern,” she said placatingly, “you've just got to let me put this picture of myself on your chiffonier. I promise I'll take it out to-morrow. But it will look so nice here so long as you have father's and mother's on the dresser. That suit is perfectly stunning, Ern—I'm so glad I got father to get it for you. You're all right. You can go downstairs if you want to. But be sure not to move a thing.”

From there, she proceeded to her mother's room. “Now, mother, I'm going to put just a little wave in your hair. It will be so becoming and I promise you I'll do just the weeniest mite. Please, mother, please—remember it's my birthday. Oh, that's a duck! My goodness, mother, but that mauve meteor is becoming to you! I don't know, though, but what we ought to have got new lace for it, after all. That of Aunt Mary's is so yellowy.”

And, last, she dashed into her father's room, a copy of “Men's Fashions” in her hand.

“Oh, father, if you don't look swell! Mother, just you wait until you see father! Now, to be sure that you're all right, there's a picture here— Now, where is that picture—I had it a moment ago? Here it is! See, father, 'Morning, afternoon and dress.' Oh, father, you can't wear that watch-chain—there's none in the picture.”

“But, Phoebe, I always carry a watch. I'd be lost without it. And I've got to have a chain, haven't I?”

“Father, dear, please don't wear the watch to-night. It's my birthday, you know. There, that's right. You'll be the handsomest man in the house to-night. And remember, father, the instant the music strikes up, you're to open the dance with me.”

A moment later, she herded them into the downstairs living-room. She engineered them brilliantly through that moment of embarrassment which accompanied their first glimpse of each other. She even successfully parried Mr. Martin's sardonic, “Bertha, is that method of arranging your hair the result of premeditation or accident—or has Phoebe ordered it?” and Ernest's heated, “This coat pinches so under the arms that I've a good mind to take it off and put on a sweater.” After that, in order to get herself dressed, Phoebe had to leave them alone with each other. As was inevitable, discipline relaxed. The deadly depression that, by an interminable quarter of an hour, precedes all entertaining, fell heavily on the Martin family.

“I can't dance a step to-night,” Ernest prophesied morosely. “These pumps hurt like the very dickens!”

“Edward,” Mrs. Martin said fearfully, “I feel like a dressed-up doll with my hair curled like this. And Phoebe would have a transparent yoke to this dress.”

“Oh, you look all right, Bertha,” Mr. Martin growled. “But what I want to know is how did we ever come to get dragged into such a mess?”

“Oh, I don't know, Edward,” Mrs. Martin groaned. “I feel so queer. How are we going to take care of all those people? I don't feel as if I could say one word.”

“Me,” Mr. Martin remarked saturninely, “all I know is that I was counting up to-day, and I find this affair has put me back just fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Oh, Edward!” Mrs. Martin wailed.

Then, providentially, Phoebe returned—a Phoebe brilliant as a California poppy in her apricot gown, a Phoebe with gray eyes unnaturally bright, a Phoebe with an unaccustomed winy flush burning through the olive of her skin, a Phoebe whose tall, slim, virginal presence so dripped and shimmered with beauty that even her mother gasped as she looked at her.

And then the bell rang.

Five minutes later, the radiant excitement inevitable to hospitality had quite freed Mr. and Mrs. Martin of their self-consciousness. Fifteen minutes later, a steady file of maidenhood trooping, muffled and shapeless, to Phoebe's room, had returned delicate, floating bubbles of femininity. Twenty minutes later, the group of husky adolescents—putting off the fatal moment of introduction by a cowardly segregation in Ernest's room—had been routed out to the last man. Twenty-five minutes later, Mrs. Martin was welcoming Mrs. Marsh and Florence in the tones of an established composure. A half an hour later, Phoebe had discovered, to the swaying music of the first waltz, that her father was an excellent dancer, and Ernest had found himself whirling about the room a mother who had feet of thistledown. An hour later, the figures which Phoebe had invented and the favors which she had made were turning the cotillion into a pageant.

Mr. and Mrs. Martin finally lost sight of their children in the flutter of conducting Mrs. Marsh on a voyage about the house. Mrs. Marsh was a large, square, bulky lady, cut on strict mathematical lines, better fitted, architecturally, than anybody else in the house to adorn the mission furniture which Phoebe had selected.

“Ah, Mrs. Martin,” she was saying in her heaviest tone of patronage, “I'm so glad to see that you have not fallen under the spell of the modern craze for antiques. You, like me, have gone in for the furniture of your period. Personally, I have the greatest interest in my contemporaries. I believe it a duty for us to encourage the able mechanics of our own generation.”

Of course Mr. and Mrs. Martin did not know the hidden tragedy of Mrs. Marsh's domestic life. Early in her married career, she had invested several thousand dollars in a houseful of modern furniture, only to discover later that “the thing,” so far as household goods were concerned, was to collect antiques.

Mr. Martin, it was, who answered her. “Yes,” he said, “I confess that I like the modern stuff. My wife and I have been feeling for a long time that we ought to get rid of the old furniture we've had ever since we were married. But you know how it is about these things—you talk about it for years before you really do anything. The other day we just made up our minds that the time had come. We put in a whole day in Boston, buying these things.”

“They are in excellent taste,” Mrs. Marsh said, and again, impressively, “in excellent taste.”

“There was a set in Circassian walnut,” Mr. Martin went on recklessly, “that my wife liked immensely, although we didn't get it. But to-morrow, Bertha, I'm going to telephone them to send it out here.” He fixed his wife with an expression that dared her to raise the banner of economy.

But Mrs. Martin only said placidly, “That's right, Edward—it will go beautifully with that old-rose paper. And, Edward, I've been thinking. Next spring, I want you to build on an outside dining-room at the back of the house and a piazza at the side.”

A little after twelve, the file of delicate, floating bubbles of femininity had begun to troop to Phoebe's room, returning muffled and shapeless. Now they were vanishing down the street, accompanied by a twin file of the husky adolescents. Mrs. Marsh, having lingered unaccountably long, was saying in farewell:

“Oh, Mrs. Martin, do let me present your name for membership in our Woman's Club. Your children are almost grown up now and I don't think you have quite the right to neglect your civic duties any longer. I'm very sure I can get you elected in time for you to serve on the committee for Gentlemen's Night. We need women there with just your peculiar talent for entertaining—who can plan things and make them go. And do wear that gown—that old pointe de Venise is simply marvelous. And remember, Mrs. Martin, that the next time Mr. Martin attends a committee meeting at our house, you must be sure to come, too. Some of the wives have got into the habit of spending the evening with me—and we do have such pleasant evenings. Not wasted evenings, I assure you, Mrs. Martin, for while the rest sew, one of our number always reads from some instructive book. Good night, dear Mrs. Martin.”

“Well,” Mr. Martin said when he came back from putting Mrs. Marsh into her carriage, “we must give more of these little affairs, mother. They're no trouble at all and very little expense.” His eyes glowed as they rested on his wife's happy face.

“Sure! That was the best ice-cream I ever tasted,” approved Ernest. “I had five plates.”

And, “Now, Mother Martin, you see!” crowed Phoebe. “We never could have made such a hit if it hadn't been for that furniture you and father bought.”