e.

"The aristocratic parlour-lamp is indisposed," he said. "It has balked,
refuses to turn up, and smells dreadfully."

"Bring in the plebeians, George," Fred cried gaily, "and never mind the
patrician--the forty-cent plebs never fail. I told Jim Russell to bring
his lantern, and Peter can stand in a corner and light matches if we
are short."

"It's working now," Edith called from the parlour, "burning
beautifully; mother drew her hand over it."

Soon the company began to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some
of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and
unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and
awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they
were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking it a virtue to
stifle every ambition, smother every craving for pleasure.

When they felt tired, they called it laziness and felt disgraced, and
thus they had spent their days, working, working from the gray dawn,
until the darkness came again, and all for what? When in after years
these girls, broken in health and in spirits, slipped away to premature
graves, or, worse still, settled into chronic invalidism, of what avail
was the memory of the cows they milked, the mats they hooked, the
number of pounds of butter they made.

Not all the girls were like these. Maud Murray was there. Maud Murray
with the milkmaid cheeks and curly black hair, the typical country girl
of bounding life aid spirits, the type so often seen upon the stage and
so seldom elsewhere.

Mrs. Motherwell had warned Tom against Maud Murray as well as Nellie
Slater. She had once seen Maud churning, and she had had a newspaper
pinned to the wall in front of her, and was reading it as she worked,
and Mrs. Motherwell knew that a girl who would do that would come to no
good.

Martha Perkins was the one girl of whom Mrs. Motherwell approved.
Martha's record on butter and quilts and mats stood high. Martha was a
nice quiet girl. Mrs. Motherwell often said a "nice, quiet, unappearing
girl." Martha certainly was quiet. Her conversational attainments did
not run high. "Things is what they are, and what's the good of saying
anything," Martha had once said in defence of her silent ways.

She was small and sallow-skinned and was dressed in an anaemic gray;
her thin hay-coloured hair was combed straight back from a rather fine
forehead. She stooped a little when she walked, and even when