Yet Martin Cortright, the Bookworm, was a pavement worshipper too, and he came last fall for over a Sunday to wake father up; for I believe men sometimes need the society of others of their own age and past, as much as children need childlife, and Martin stayed a month, and is promising to return next spring.  I wonder if the Sylvia Latham who has been travelling with Miss Lavinia is any kin of the Lathams who are building the great colonial home above the Jenks-Smiths.  I have never seen any of the family except Mrs. Latham, a tall, colourless blonde, who reminds one of a handsome unlit lamp.  She seems to be superintending the work by coming up now and then, and I met her at the butcher’s where she was buying sweetbreads—­“a trifle for luncheon.”  Accusation No. 1, against the Whirlpoolers:  Since their advent sweetbreads have risen from two pairs for a quarter, and “thank you kindly for taking them off our hands,” to fifty cents to a dollar a “set.”  We no longer care for sweetbreads!

* * * * *

I was therefore amused, but no longer surprised, at the exaggerated way in which the childless Lady of the Bluffs,—­her step-daughter having ten years back made a foolish foreign marriage,—­gave me her views upon the drawbacks of the daughters of her world, when she made me, on her return from a European trip, a visit upon the twins’ first birthday,—­bearing, with her usually reckless generosity, a pair of costly gold apostle spoons, as she said, “to cut their teeth on.”  I admired, but frugally popped them into the applewood treasure chests that father has had made for the boys from the “mother tree,” that was finally laid low by a tornado the winter of their birth and is now succeeded by a younger one of Richard’s choice.

“My dear woman,” she gasped, turning my face toward the light and dropping into a chair at the same time, “how well you look; not a bit upset by the double dose and sitting up nights and all that.  But then, maybe, they sleep and you haven’t; for it’s always the unexpected and unusual that happens in your case, as this proves.  But then, they are boys, and that’s everything nowadays, the way society’s going, especially to people like you, whose husband’s trade, though pretty, is too open and above-board to be a well-paying one, and yet you’re thoroughbreds underneath.” (Poor vulgar soul, she didn’t in the least realize how I might take her stricture any more than she saw my desire to laugh.)

“Of course here and there a girl in society does turn out well and rides an elephant or a coronet,—­of course I mean wears a coronet,—­though ten to one it jams the hairpins into her head, but mostly daughters are regular hornets,—­that is, if you’re ambitious and mean to keep in society.  Of course you’re not in it, and, being comfortably poor, so to speak, might be content to see your girls marry their best chance, even if it wasn’t worth much a year, and settle down to babies and minding their own business; but then they mightn’t agree to that, and where would you and Evan be?