She duly brought him home with her to dinner on the evening after her little talk with her parents.  Owen was usually to be found browsing about the region where Sandy played marches twice a week for sewing classes in a neighborhood house.  They often met, and Sandy sometimes went to have tea with his mother, and sometimes, as to-day, brought him home with her.

Owen had with him the letters, pamphlets and booklet issued by the American School of Domestic Science, and after dinner, while the Salisbury boys wrestled with their lessons, the three others and Owen gathered about the drawing-room table, in the late daylight, and thoroughly investigated the new institution and its claims.  Sandy wedged her slender little person in between the two men.  Mrs. Salisbury sat near by, reading what was handed to her.  The older woman’s attitude was one of dispassionate unbelief; she smiled a benign indulgence upon these newfangled ideas.  But in her heart she felt the stirring of feminine uneasiness and resentment.  It was her sacred region, after all, into which these young people were probing so light-heartedly.  These were her secrets that they were exploiting; her methods were to be disparaged, tossed aside.

The booklet, with its imposing A.S.D.S. set out fair and plain upon a brown cover, was exhaustive.  Its frontispiece was a portrait of one Eliza Slocumb Holley, founder of the school, and on its back cover it bore the vignetted photograph of a very pretty graduate, in apron and cap, with her broom and feather duster.  In between these two pictures were pages and pages of information, dozens of pictures.  There were delightful long perspectives of model kitchens, of vegetable gardens, orchards, and dairies.  There were pictures of girls making jam, and sterilizing bottles, and arranging trays for the sick.  There were girls amusing children and making beds.  There were glimpses of the model flats, built into the college buildings, with gas stoves and dumb-waiters.  And there were the usual pictures of libraries, and playgrounds, and tennis courts.

“Such nice-looking girls!” said Sandy.

“Oh, Mother says that they are splendid girls,” Owen said, bashfully eager, “just the kind that go in for trained nursing, you know, or stenography, or bookkeeping.”

“They must be a solid comfort, those girls,” said Mrs. Salisbury, leaning over to read certain pages with the others. “‘First year,’” she read aloud. “’Care of kitchen, pantry, and utensils—­fire-making—­disposal of refuse—­table-setting—­service—­care of furniture—­cooking with gas—­patent sweepers—­sweeping—­dusting—­ care of silver—­bread—­vegetables—­puddings—­’”

“Help!” said Sandy.  “It sounds like the essence of a thousand Mondays!  No one could possibly learn all that in one year.”

“It’s a long term, eleven months,” her father said, deeply interested.  “That’s not all of the first year, either.  But it’s all practical enough.”