hing is Father. He is peaceable as a lamb. She is
not to teach, but to spend the winter sewing on her clothes and
bedding, and Father told her he would give her the necessary money.
She said so. And I suspect he will. He always favoured her because
she was so pretty, and she can come closer to wheedling him than any of
the rest of us excepting you, Agatha."

"It is an innovation, surely!"

"Mother is nearly as bad. Father furnishing money for clothes and
painting the barn is no more remarkable than Mother letting her turn
the house inside out. If it had been I, Father would have told me to
teach my school this winter, buy my own clothes and linen with the
money I had earned, and do my sewing next summer. But I am not jealous.
It is because she is handsome, and the man fine-looking and with such
good prospects."

"There you have it!" said Adam emphatically. "If it were you, marrying
Jim Lang, to live on Lang's west forty, you WOULD pay your own way.
But if it were you marrying a fine-looking young doctor, who will soon
be a power in Hartley, no doubt, it would tickle Father's vanity until
he would do the same for you."

"I doubt it!" said Kate. "I can't see the vanity in Father."

"You can't?" said Adam, Jr., bitterly. "Maybe not! You have not been
with him in the Treasurer's office when he calls for 'the tax on those
little parcels of land of mine.' He looks every inch of six feet six
then, and swells like a toad. To hear him you would think sixteen
hundred and fifty acres of the cream of this county could be tied in a
bandanna and carried on a walking stick, he is so casual about it. And
those men fly around like buttons on a barn door to wait on him and
it's 'Mister Bates this' and 'Mister Bates that,' until it turns my
stomach. Vanity! He rolls in it! He eats it! He risks losing our
land for us that some of us have slaved over for twenty years, to feed
that especial vein of his vanity. Where should we be if he let
anything happen to those deeds?"

"How refreshing!" cried Kate. "I love to hear you grouching! I hear
nothing else from the women of the Bates family, but I didn't even know
the men had a grouch. Are Peter, and John, and Hiram, and the other
boys sore, too?"

"I should say they are! But they are too diplomatic to say so. They
are afraid to cheep. I just open my head and say right out loud in
meeting that since I've turned in the taxes and insurance for all these
years and impr