thelny laughed
at them.

"You two and your Spanish!" she said. "Why don't you do something useful?"

But Sally, who was growing up and was to put up her hair at Christmas,
stood by sometimes and listened in her grave way while her father and
Philip exchanged remarks in a language she did not understand. She thought
her father the most wonderful man who had ever existed, and she expressed
her opinion of Philip only through her father's commendations.

"Father thinks a rare lot of your Uncle Philip," she remarked to her
brothers and sisters.

Thorpe, the eldest boy, was old enough to go on the Arethusa, and Athelny
regaled his family with magnificent descriptions of the appearance the lad
would make when he came back in uniform for his holidays. As soon as Sally
was seventeen she was to be apprenticed to a dressmaker. Athelny in his
rhetorical way talked of the birds, strong enough to fly now, who were
leaving the parental nest, and with tears in his eyes told them that the
nest would be there still if ever they wished to return to it. A shakedown
and a dinner would always be theirs, and the heart of a father would never
be closed to the troubles of his children.

"You do talk, Athelny," said his wife. "I don't know what trouble they're
likely to get into so long as they're steady. So long as you're honest and
not afraid of work you'll never be out of a job, that's what I think, and
I can tell you I shan't be sorry when I see the last of them earning their
own living."

Child-bearing, hard work, and constant anxiety were beginning to tell on
Mrs. Athelny; and sometimes her back ached in the evening so that she had
to sit down and rest herself. Her ideal of happiness was to have a girl to
do the rough work so that she need not herself get up before seven.
Athelny waved his beautiful white hand.

"Ah, my Betty, we've deserved well of the state, you and I. We've reared
nine healthy children, and the boys shall serve their king; the girls
shall cook and sew and in their turn breed healthy children." He turned to
Sally, and to comfort her for the anti-climax of the contrast added
grandiloquently: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Athelny had lately added socialism to the other contradictory theories he
vehemently believed in, and he stated now:

"In a socialist state we should be richly pensioned, you and I, Betty."

"Oh, don't talk to me about your socialists, I've got no patience with
them," she cried. "