! I beg your pardon, Lyd," she added penitently, laying her
hand on Lydia's arm. "But you know Rodney's sisters would die if Grace
came!"

"Well, I think it's a mistake to slight Grace," Lydia persisted.

Martie studied her pencilled list gloomily for a few seconds.

"Sometimes I wish we weren't having it!" she said moodily.

"Oh, Martie, when we've always said we'd give ANYTHING to entertain as
other people do!" Sally exclaimed. "I DO think that's unreasonable!"

Martie made no answer. She was looking at a memorandum which read:
"Invitations--cream--Angela--stamps--illusion--slippers."

As the days went by the thought of the dance grew more and more
troublesome. The details of the affair were too strange to be entered
into with any confidence, any rush of enthusiasm and spontaneity. Every
hour brought her fresh cause for worry.

Nothing went well. The thought of her dress worried her. She had
conceived the idea of a black gown ornamented with cretonne roses,
carefully applied. She and Sally cut out the flowers, and applied them
with buttonhole stitch, sewing until their fingers were sore, their
faces flushed, and their hair in frowsy disorder. It was slow work.
Miss Pepper, the seamstress, engaged for one day only to do the
important work on both Sally's and Martie's gown, kept postponing, as
she always did postpone, the day, finally appointing the Wednesday
before Thanksgiving Day. Pa's cousin, a certain Mrs. Potts, wrote from
Portland that she was coming down for the holiday, and Sally and Martie
could have wept at the thought of the complication of having her
exacting presence in the house. Worse than this Pa, who was to have
gone to San Francisco on business on Friday morning--whose decision to
do so had indeed been one of Martie's reasons for selecting this date
for the affair--suddenly changed his plan. He need not go until
December, he said.

Leonard, who at first had been faintly interested in the proceedings,
later annoyed his sisters by intimating that he would not be present at
the dance. Martie and Sally did not want him for any social qualities
he possessed, but he was a male; he would at least help to offset the
alarming plurality of females.

Acceptances came promptly from the young women of Monroe, even from Ida
and May Parker. Florence Frost regretted; she was smitten even now with
the incurable illness that would end her empty life a few years later.
Such men as Martie and Sally had been abl