“That means she has asked Tom Motherwell,” Peter explained.

Then Mrs. Slater told them to hurry along with their supper for the people would soon be coming.

It was Mrs. Slater who had planned the party.  Mrs. Slater was the leading spirit in everything in the household that required dash and daring.  Hers was the dominant voice, though nothing louder than a whisper had been heard from her for years.  She laughed in a whisper, she cried in a whisper.  Yet in some way her laugh was contagious, and her tears brought comfort to those with whom she wept.

When she proposed the party the girls foresaw difficulties.  The house was small—­there were so many to ask—­it was a busy time.

Mrs. Slater stood firm.

“Ask everybody,” she whispered.  “Nobody minds being crowded at a party.  I was at a party once where we had to go outside to turn around, the house was so small.  I’ll never forget what a good time we had.”

Mr. Slater was dressed and ready for anything long before the time had come for the guests to arrive.  An hour before he had sat down resignedly and said, “Come, girls, do as you think best with the old man, scrub him, polish him, powder him, blacken his eyebrows, do not spare him, he’s yours,” and the girls had laughingly accepted the privilege.

George, whose duty it was to attend to the lamps for the occasion, came in with a worried look, on his usually placid face.

“The aristocratic parlour-lamp is indisposed,” he said.  “It has balked, refuses to turn up, and smells dreadfully.”

“Bring in the plebeians, George,” Fred cried gaily, “and never mind the patrician—­the forty-cent plebs never fail.  I told Jim Russell to bring his lantern, and Peter can stand in a corner and light matches if we are short.”

“It’s working now,” Edith called from the parlour, “burning beautifully; mother drew her hand over it.”

Soon the company began to arrive.  Bashful, self-conscious girls, some of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward.  These were the daughters of rich farmers.  Good girls they were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking it a virtue to stifle every ambition, smother every craving for pleasure.

When they felt tired, they called it laziness and felt disgraced, and thus they had spent their days, working, working from the gray dawn, until the darkness came again, and all for what?  When in after years these girls, broken in health and in spirits, slipped away to premature graves, or, worse still, settled into chronic invalidism, of what avail was the memory of the cows they milked, the mats they hooked, the number of pounds of butter they made.

Not all the girls were like these.  Maud Murray was there.  Maud Murray with the milkmaid cheeks and curly black hair, the typical country girl of bounding life aid spirits, the type so often seen upon the stage and so seldom elsewhere.