And Deborah, was as bad as the bride.  At times it appeared to Roger as though her fingers fairly itched to jab and tug at his poor old house, which wore an air of mute reproach.  She revealed a part of her nature that he viewed with dark amazement.  Every hour she could spare from school, she was changing something or other at home—­with an eager glitter in her eyes.  Doing it all for Laura, she said.  Fiddlesticks and rubbish!  She did it because she liked it!

In gloomy wrath one afternoon he went up to see Edith and quiet down.  She was well on the way to recovery, but instead of receiving solace here he only found fresh troubles.  For sitting up in her old-fashioned bed, with an old-fashioned cap of lace upon her shapely little head, Edith made her father feel she had washed her hands of the whole affair.

“I’m sorry,” she said in an injured tone, “that Laura doesn’t care enough about her oldest sister to put off the wedding two or three weeks so I could be there.  It seems rather undignified, I think, for a girl to hurry her wedding so.  I should have loved to make it the dear simple kind of wedding which mother would have wanted.  But so long as she doesn’t care for that—­and in fact has only found ten minutes—­once—­to run in and see the baby—­”

In dismay her father found himself defending the very daughter of whom he had come to complain.  It was not such a short engagement, he said, he had learned they had been engaged some time before they told him.

“Do you approve of that?” she rejoined.  “When I was engaged, I made Bruce go to you before I even let him—­” here Edith broke off primly.  “Of course that was some time ago.  An engagement, Laura tells me, is ’a mere experiment’ nowadays.  They ‘experiment’ till they feel quite sure—­then notify their parents and get married in a week.”

“She is rushing it, I admit,” Roger soothingly replied.  “But she has her mind set on Paris in June.”

“Paris in June,” said Edith, “sums up in three words Laura’s whole conception of marriage.  You really ought to talk to her, father.  It’s your duty, it seems to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d rather not tell you.”  Edith’s glance went sternly to the cradle by her bed.  “Laura pities me,” she said, “for having had five children.”

“Oh, now, my dear girl!”

“She does, though—­she said as much.  When she dropped in the other day and I tried to be sympathetic and give her a little sound advice, she said I had had the wedding I liked and the kind of married life I liked, and she was going to have hers.  And she made it quite plain that her kind is to include no children.  It’s to be simply an effort to find by ‘experiment’ whether or not she loves Hal Sloane.  If she doesn’t—­” Edith gave a slight but emphatic wave of dismissal.

“Do you mean to say Laura told you that?” her father asked with an angry frown.

“I mean she made me feel it—­as plainly as I’m telling it!  What I can’t understand,” his daughter went on, “is Deborah’s attitude in the affair.”