In fact, it had been Billy’s idea, their choosing Quantuck, that summer.  Years before, in his young boyhood, the Farringtons had been there, season after season, and he had always wanted to get back to the old place.  Again and again he had been prevented, and it was not until this summer that he had succeeded in carrying out his plans.  Now, for the first time in years, Dr. McAlister had consented to take a long vacation; Theodora’s novel was locked up in the safe at home, waiting for revision; Hubert was to be with them for three weeks of the time, and Hope had come on from Helena to make the family circle complete.

To no one of the family had the week before the flitting been absolutely enjoyable.  On one scorching July morning, Phebe and Phebe’s own familiar friend, Isabel St. John, had roused their respective households at four o’clock in order that they might catch the six-thirty train for New York.  Once there, they betook themselves to Hester Street in order to study the conditions of life in the East Side.  It chanced, however, to be Friday, market day, and the place was a veritable Babel with the cries of the hucksters and the shrill clamor of the women elbowing each other about the push-carts.  No one paid any heed to the girls; and on their side, after a brief inspection they paid heed to but one question, how to get out of the region as speedily as possible.  Accordingly, they went up town to lunch, strolled about Twenty-third Street for an hour or two before going to the office of the fresh-air charity, and, late that evening, reappeared at their own front doors, each with a wan and weary child at her heels.  Isabel’s was a boy; Phebe, in deference to the conditions of a family treaty, had a girl.

For about three weeks, Phebe’s table had been heaped with books on child-study, on pedagogy, on domestic hygiene; her room had been littered with syllabi on child impressions in every conceivable relation.  Phebe was resolved to be scientific, or die in the attempt.  She came nearer achieving the latter alternative.  The struggle began on the first morning of her new charge.  She was up early and ran down to the kitchen to put the oatmeal over the fire.  Then full of courage and sociological zeal, she approached the tub, a thermometer in one hand, the child in the other.  The fray which followed, was a short one.  It began with Phebe’s dropping the thermometer on the floor and plumping the child bodily into the bath.  It ended with the child’s breaking away and diving into bed again, dripping with bath-water and tears, while Phebe picked up the scattered fragments of the thermometer and fished the towels from the tub where they floated limply.