The only weak spot in this good german woman’s conduct was the way she spoiled her boy, who was not honest and who was very hard to manage.

The father of this family was a decent, quiet, heavy, and uninterfering german man.  He tried to cure the boy of his bad ways, and make him honest, but the mother could not make herself let the father manage, and so the boy was brought up very badly.

Mrs. Haydon’s girls were now only just beginning as young ladies, and so to get her niece, Lena, married, was just then the most important thing that Mrs. Haydon had to do.

Mrs. Haydon had four years before gone to Germany to see her parents, and had taken the girls with her.  This visit had been for Mrs. Haydon most successful, though her children had not liked it very well.

Mrs. Haydon was a good and generous woman, and she patronized her parents grandly, and all the cousins who came from all about to see her.  Mrs. Haydon’s people were of the middling class of farmers.  They were not peasants, and they lived in a town of some pretension, but it all seemed very poor and smelly to Mrs. Haydon’s american born daughters.

Mrs. Haydon liked it all.  It was familiar, and then here she was so wealthy and important.  She listened and decided, and advised all of her relations how to do things better.  She arranged their present and their future for them, and showed them how in the past they had been wrong in all their methods.

Mrs. Haydon’s only trouble was with her two daughters, whom she could not make behave well to her parents.  The two girls were very nasty to all their numerous relations.  Their mother could hardly make them kiss their grandparents, and every day the girls would get a scolding.  But then Mrs. Haydon was so very busy that she did not have time to really manage her stubborn daughters.

These hard working, earth-rough german cousins were to these american born children, ugly and dirty, and as far below them as were italian or negro workmen, and they could not see how their mother could ever bear to touch them, and then all the women dressed so funny, and were worked all rough and different.

The two girls stuck up their noses at them all, and always talked in English to each other about how they hated all these people and how they wished their mother would not do so.  The girls could talk some German, but they never chose to use it.

It was her eldest brother’s family that most interested Mrs. Haydon.  Here there were eight children, and out of the eight, five of them were girls.

Mrs. Haydon thought it would be a fine thing to take one of these girls back with her to Bridgepoint and get her well started.  Everybody liked that she should do so and they were all willing that it should be Lena.

Lena was the second girl in her large family.  She was at this time just seventeen years old.  Lena was not an important daughter in the family.  She was always sort of dreamy and not there.  She worked hard and went very regularly at it, but even good work never seemed to bring her near.