id Edward.

"You're always seeing what you can do, but I notice you never do
anything," retorted Hannah; and Edward had the wisdom not to reply.
Beside his place lay a lengthy, close-written letter, and from time to
time, as he ate his canned pears, his hand turned over one of its many
sheets.

"It's from Eben Wheeler, says he's been considerably troubled with
asthma," he observed presently. "His mother was a Bumpus, a daughter of
Caleb-descended from Robert, who went from Dolton to Tewksbury in 1816,
and fought in the war of 1812. I've told you about him. This Caleb was
born in '53, and he's living now with his daughter's family in
Detroit.... Son-in-law's named Nott, doing well with a construction
company. Now I never could find out before what became of Robert's
descendants. He married Sarah Styles" (reading painfully) "`and they had
issue, John, Robert, Anne, Susan, Eliphalet. John went to Middlebury,
Vermont, and married '"

Hannah, gathering up the plates, clattered them together noisily.

"A lot of good it does us to have all that information about Eben
Wheeler's asthma!" she complained. "It'll buy us a new stove, I guess.
Him and his old Bumpus papers! If the house burned down over our heads
that's all he'd think of."

As she passed to and fro from the dining-room to the kitchen Hannah's
lamentations continued, grew more and more querulous. Accustomed as Janet
was to these frequent arraignments of her father's inefficiency, it was
gradually borne in upon her now--despite a preoccupation with her own
fate--that the affair thus plaintively voiced by her mother was in effect
a family crisis of the first magnitude. She was stirred anew to anger and
revolt against a life so precarious and sordid as to be threatened in its
continuity by the absurd failure of a stove, when, glancing at her
sister, she felt a sharp pang of self-conviction, of self-disgust. Was
she, also, like that, indifferent and self-absorbed? Lise, in her evening
finery, looking occasionally at the clock, was awaiting the hour set for
a rendezvous, whiling away the time with the Boston evening sheet whose
glaring red headlines stretched across the page. When the newspaper fell
to her lap a dreamy expression clouded Lise's eyes. She was thinking of
some man! Quickly Janet looked away, at her father, only to be repelled
anew by the expression, almost of fatuity, she discovered on his face as
he bent over the letter once more. Suddenly she experien