little Neighborhood House for boys down on
River Street, 'The Cyrus Sargent Memorial.' And, if you please, he's
going to LIVE there! It's a ducky house; he showed me the blue-prints,
with the darlingest apartment for himself you ever saw, and a plunge,
and a roof gymnasium. It's going to cost, endowment and all, three
hundred thousand dollars--"

"Good heavens!" Mrs. Salisbury said, as one stricken.

"And the worst of it is," Alexandra pursued, with a sympathetic laugh
for her mother's concern, "that he'll meet some Madonna-eyed little
factory girl or laundry worker down there and feel that he owes it to
her to--"

"To break your heart, Sandy," the mother supplied, all tender
solicitude.

"It's not so much a question of my heart," Sandy answered composedly,
"as it is a question of his entire life. It's so unnecessary and
senseless!"

"And you can sit there calmly discussing it!" Mrs. Salisbury said,
thoroughly out of temper with the entire scheme of things mundane.
"Upon my word, I never saw or heard anything like it!" she observed. "I
wonder that you don't quietly tell Owen that you care for him--but it's
too dreadful to joke about! I give you up!"

And she rose from her chair, and went quickly out of the room, every
line in her erect little figure expressing exasperation and
inflexibility. Sandy, smiling sleepily, reopened an interrupted novel.
But she stared over the open page into space for a few moments, and
finally spoke:

"Upon my word, I don't know that that's at all a bad idea!" an
interrupted novel. But she stared over the open page into space for a
few moments, and finally spoke:

"Upon my word, I don't know that that's at all a bad idea!"

CHAPTER V

"Mrs. Salisbury," said Justine, when her mistress came into the kitchen
one December morning, "I've had a note from Mrs. Sargent--"

"From Mrs. Sargent?" Mrs. Salisbury repeated, astonished. And to
herself she said: "She's trying to get Justine away from me!"

"She writes as Chairman of the Department of Civics of the Forum Club,"
pursued Justine, referring to the letter she held in her hand, "to ask
me if I will address the club some Thursday on the subject of the
College of Domestic Science. I know that you expect to give a card
party some Thursday, and I thought I would make sure just which one you
meant."

Mrs. Salisbury, taken entirely unaware, was actually speechless for a
moment. The Forum was, of all her clubs, the one in which