“I can’t set ’em all up in business, but I want a girl that goes through the school to feel that she won’t have to break her back in an overall factory all her life, or dance around some floor-walker with a waxed mustache.  They tell me no American girl who has ever seen a trolley car will go into a kitchen to work—­she can’t have her beaux going round to the back door.  Sylvia, we’ve got to turn out cooks that are worth going to kitchen doors to see!  Now, I’ve taught you this summer how to make currant jelly that you needn’t be ashamed of anywhere on earth, and it didn’t hurt you any.  A white woman can’t learn to cook the way darkies do, just by instinct.  That’s a miracle, by the way, that I never heard explained—­how these colored women cook as the good ones do—­those old-fashioned darkies who take the cook book out of your hand and look at it upside down and grin and say, ‘Yes, Miss Sally,’ when they can’t read a word!  You catch a clean, wholesome white girl young enough, and make her understand that her kitchen’s a laboratory, and her work something to be proud of, and she’ll not have any trouble finding places to work where they won’t ask her to clean out the furnace and wash the automobile.”

The Bassetts had opened their cottage early and Morton Bassett had been at the lake rather more constantly than in previous summers.  Marian was off on a round of visits to the new-found friends that were the fruit of her winter at the capital.  She was much in demand for house parties, and made her engagements, quite independently of her parents, for weeks and fortnights at widely scattered mid-Western resorts.  Mrs. Bassett was indulging in the luxury of a trained nurse this summer, but even with this reinforcement she found it impossible to manage Marian.  It need hardly be said that Mrs. Owen’s philanthropic enterprises occasioned her the greatest alarm.  It was enough that “that girl” should be spending the summer at Waupegan, without bringing with her all her fellow boarders from Elizabeth House.

Mrs. Bassett had now a tangible grievance against her husband.  Blackford’s course at the military school he had chosen for himself had been so unsatisfactory that his father had been advised that he would not be received for another year.  It was now Mrs. Bassett’s turn to cavil at her husband for the sad mess he had made of the boy’s education.  She would never have sent Blackford to a military school if it had been her affair; she arraigned her husband for having encouraged the boy in his dreams of West Point.

Blackford’s father continuing indifferent, Mrs. Bassett rose from bed one hot August day filled with determination.  Blackford, confident of immunity from books through the long vacation, was enjoying himself thoroughly at the lake.  He was a perfectly healthy, good-natured lad, whose faults were much like those of the cheerful, undisciplined Marian.  His mother scanned the reports of Blackford’s demerits and decided that he required tutoring immediately.