Since they had blessedly been relieved of the presence of their talented
daughter, who, until her marriage, had been polite to them to such an
extent that for years they had lived in terror, they had made rather a
point of being naughty and noisy and happy together, but by and by they
would get tired and look affectionately across the table and purr.
Father tinkered away at a broken lamp-shade till suddenly, without
warning, he declared that Mother scolded him merely to conceal her faith
in his ability to do anything. She sniffed, but she knew that he was
right. For years Mother had continued to believe in the cleverness of
Seth Appleby, who, in his youth, had promised to become manager of the
shoe-store, and gave the same promise to-day.

Father justified his shameless boast by compelling Mr. Pilkings to grant
him the usual leave of absence, and they prepared to start for West
Skipsit, Cape Cod, where they always spent their vacations at the
farm-house of Uncle Joe Tubbs.

Mother took a week to pack, and unpack, to go panting down-stairs to the
corner drug-store for new tubes of tooth-paste and a presentable sponge,
to remend all that was remendable, to press Father's flappy, shapeless
little trousers with the family flat-iron, to worry over whether she
should take the rose-pink or the daffodil-yellow wrapper--which had both
faded to approximately the same shade of gray, but which were to her
trusting mind still interestingly different. Each year she had to
impress Mrs. Tubbs of West Skipsit with new metropolitan finery, and
this year Father had no peace nor comfort in the menage till she had
selected a smart new hat, incredibly small and close and sinking coyly
down over her ear. He was only a man folk, he was in the way, incapable
of understanding this problem of fashion, and Mother almost slapped him
one evening for suggesting that it "wouldn't make such a gosh-awful lot
of difference if she didn't find some new fad to impress Sister Tubbs."

But Mother wearied of repacking their two cheap wicker suit-cases and
the brown pasteboard box, and Father suddenly came to the front in his
true capacity as boss and leader. He announced, loudly, on the evening
before they were to depart, "We're going to have a party to-night, old
lady."

At the masterful tones of this man of the world, who wasn't afraid of
train or travel, who had gone successfully through the mysteries of
purchasing transportation clear to Cape Cod, Mo