“Beans!” Hannah cried.  “You’re lucky to have any supper at all.  I just wish I could get you to take a look at that oven—­there’s a hole you can put your hand through, if you’ve a mind to.  I’ve done my best, I’ve made out to patch it from time to time, and to-day I had Mr. Tiernan in.  He says it’s a miracle I’ve been able to bake anything.  A new one’ll cost thirty dollars, and I don’t know where the money’s coming from to buy it.  And the fire-box is most worn through.”

“Well, mother, we’ll see what we can do,” said Edward.

“You’re always seeing what you can do, but I notice you never do anything,” retorted Hannah; and Edward had the wisdom not to reply.  Beside his place lay a lengthy, close-written letter, and from time to time, as he ate his canned pears, his hand turned over one of its many sheets.

“It’s from Eben Wheeler, says he’s been considerably troubled with asthma,” he observed presently.  “His mother was a Bumpus, a daughter of Caleb-descended from Robert, who went from Dolton to Tewksbury in 1816, and fought in the war of 1812.  I’ve told you about him.  This Caleb was born in ’53, and he’s living now with his daughter’s family in Detroit....  Son-in-law’s named Nott, doing well with a construction company.  Now I never could find out before what became of Robert’s descendants.  He married Sarah Styles” (reading painfully) “`and they had issue, John, Robert, Anne, Susan, Eliphalet.  John went to Middlebury, Vermont, and married ’”

Hannah, gathering up the plates, clattered them together noisily.

“A lot of good it does us to have all that information about Eben Wheeler’s asthma!” she complained.  “It’ll buy us a new stove, I guess.  Him and his old Bumpus papers!  If the house burned down over our heads that’s all he’d think of.”

As she passed to and fro from the dining-room to the kitchen Hannah’s lamentations continued, grew more and more querulous.  Accustomed as Janet was to these frequent arraignments of her father’s inefficiency, it was gradually borne in upon her now—­despite a preoccupation with her own fate—­that the affair thus plaintively voiced by her mother was in effect a family crisis of the first magnitude.  She was stirred anew to anger and revolt against a life so precarious and sordid as to be threatened in its continuity by the absurd failure of a stove, when, glancing at her sister, she felt a sharp pang of self-conviction, of self-disgust.  Was she, also, like that, indifferent and self-absorbed?  Lise, in her evening finery, looking occasionally at the clock, was awaiting the hour set for a rendezvous, whiling away the time with the Boston evening sheet whose glaring red headlines stretched across the page.  When the newspaper fell to her lap a dreamy expression clouded Lise’s eyes.  She was thinking of some man!  Quickly Janet looked away, at her father, only to be repelled anew by the expression, almost of fatuity, she discovered on his face as he bent over the letter once more.