“How did two such cranky old things ever have such happy children!” she exclaimed one day to her husband.

“Perhaps they will become what we stopped short of being,” he replied.

Graham West was something of a philosopher; rather too much of a philosopher for his wife’s peace of mind.  To her sorrow she had learned that he had no “business tact,” he could not even scrape a comfortable living off his scrubby little farm.

But I began with Linnet and fell to discoursing about her mother; it was Linnet, as she appeared in her grayish brown dress with a knot of crimson at her throat, running down the stairway, that suggested her mother’s thought to me.

“Linnet is almost growing up,” she had said to herself as she removed her cap for her customary afternoon nap.  This afternoon nap refreshed her countenance and kept her from looking six years older than her husband.  Mrs. West was not a worldly woman, but she did not like to look six years older than her husband.

Linnet searched through parlor and hall, then out on the piazza, then looked through the front yard, and, finally, having explored the garden, found Marjorie and her friend in camp-chairs on the soft green turf under the low hanging boughs of an apple-tree behind the house.  There were two or three books in Marjorie’s lap, and Miss Prudence was turning the leaves of Marjorie’s Bible.  She was answering one of Marjorie’s questions Linnet supposed and wondered if Marjorie would be satisfied with the answer; she was not always satisfied, as the elder sister knew to her grievance.  For instance:  Marjorie had said to her yesterday, with that serious look in her eyes:  “Linnet, father says when Christ was on earth people didn’t have wheat ground into fine flour as we do;—­now when it is so much nicer, why do you suppose he didn’t tell them about grinding it fine?”

“Perhaps he didn’t think of it,” she replied, giving the first thought that occurred to her.

“That isn’t the reason,” returned Marjorie, “for he could think of everything he wanted to.”

“Then—­for the same reason why didn’t he tell them about chloroform and printing and telegraphing and a thousand other inventions?” questioned Linnet in her turn.

“That’s what I want to know,” said Marjorie.

Linnet settled herself on the turf and drew her work from her pocket; she was making a collar of tatting for her mother’s birthday and working at it at every spare moment.  It was the clover leaf pattern, that she had learned but a few weeks ago; the thread was very fine and she was doing it exquisitely.  She had shown it to Hollis because he was in the lace business, and he had said it was a fine specimen of “real lace.”  To make real lace was one of Linnet’s ambitions.  The lace around Marjorie’s neck was a piece that their mother had made towards her own wedding outfit.  Marjorie’s mother sighed and feared that Marjorie would never care to make lace for her wedding outfit.