“Neater, mother!  How can you?” inquired Kathleen.

“I meant neater when he is just washed and dressed,” retorted Peter’s mother.  “Are you coming to the family council, sweet Pete?”

Peter climbed on his mother’s knee and answered by a vague affirmative nod, his whole mind being on the extraction of a slippery marble from a long-necked bottle.

“Then be quiet, and speak only when we ask your advice,” continued Mrs. Carey.  “Unless I were obliged to, children, I should be sorry to go against all your wishes.  I might be willing to bear my share of a burden, but more is needed than that.”

“I think,” said Nancy suddenly, aware now of the trend of her mother’s secret convictions, “I think Julia is a smug, conceited, vain, affected little pea—­” Here she caught her mother’s eye and suddenly she heard inside of her head or heart or conscience a chime of words. “Next to father!” Making a magnificent oratorical leap she finished her sentence with only a second’s break,—­“peacock, but if mother thinks Julia is a duty, a duty she is, and we must brace up and do her.  Must we love her, mother, or can we just be good and polite to her, giving her the breast and taking the drumstick? She won’t ever say, ’Don’t let me rob you!’ like Cousin Ann, when she takes the breast!”

Kathleen looked distinctly unresigned.  She hated drumsticks and all that they stood for in life.  She disliked the wall side of the bed, the middle seat in the carriage, the heel of the loaf, the underdone biscuit, the tail part of the fish, the scorched end of the omelet.  “It will make more difference to me than anybody,” she said gloomily.

“Everything makes more difference to you, Kitty,” remarked Gilbert.

“I mean I’m always fourth when the cake plate’s passed,—­in everything!  Now Julia’ll be fourth, and I shall be fifth; it’s lucky people can’t tumble off the floor!”

“Poor abused Kathleen!” cried Gilbert.  “Well, mother, you’re always right, but I can’t see why you take another one into the family, when we’ve been saying for a week there isn’t even enough for us five to live on.  It looks mighty queer to put me in the public school and spend the money you save that way, on Julia!”

Way down deep in her heart Mother Carey felt a pang.  There was a little seed of hard self-love in Gilbert that she wanted him to dig up from the soil and get rid of before it sprouted and waxed too strong.

“Julia is a Carey chicken after all, Gilbert,” she said.

“But she’s Uncle Allan’s chicken, and I’m Captain Carey’s eldest son.”

“That’s the very note I should strike if I were you,” his mother responded, “only with a little different accent.  What would Captain Carey’s eldest son like to do for his only cousin, a little girl younger than himself,—­a girl who had a very silly, unwise, unhappy mother for the first five years of her life, and who is now practically fatherless, for a time at least?”