ve the chairs about with purposeless
industry.

"It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a
generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.

"Well, it isn't hard for me to know _this_ time," said Mrs. Weaver, her
features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine
shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose
chase."

Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back,
and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.

"I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and
wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to
nag them about. I'm sure I"--She slammed the door upon her voice, which
seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.

Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman
refused to meet her gaze.

"I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and
getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously.

Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.

"Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said
apologetically. "To think of them poor things trying to keep house--and
the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma."

Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity.

"I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done
decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she
wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!"

She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of
conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position
is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with
none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it.

"I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to
know your dooty at a glance."

Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to
such lax uncertainty.

"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night,
"you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."

Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the
proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an
amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among
his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to
exult in his daughte