“Be that as it may, my dear,” said Alix, “the fact remains that you taught this Fenton woman to drive your car, didn’t you?  And you told her that she was the best woman driver you ever knew, a better driver even than Miss Strickland; didn’t you?”

“I did not,” Peter said, unmovedly smoking and watching the fire.

“Why, Peter, you did!  She said you did!”

“Well, then, she said what is not true!”

“She distinctly told me,” Alix remarked, “that dear Mr. Joyce had said that she was the best woman driver he ever saw.”

“Well, I may have said something like that,” Peter growled, flushing.  Alix laughed exultingly.  “I tell you I loathe her!” he added.

“Daddy, we have a lovely home!” Cherry said softly, her eyes moving from the shabby books and the shabby rugs to Alix’s piano shining in the gloom of the far corner.  It was all homelike and pleasant, and somehow the atmosphere was newly inspiring to her; she had felt that the talk at dinner, the old eager controversy about books and singers and politics and science, was—­well, not brilliant, perhaps, but worth while.  She was beginning to think Peter extremely clever and only Alix’s quick tongue a match for him, and to feel that her father knew every book and had seen every worthwhile play in the world.

Martin, whose deep dissatisfaction with conditions at the “Emmy Younger Mine” Cherry well knew, had entered into a correspondence some months before relative to a position at another mine that seemed better to him, and instead of coming down for a day or two at the time of Anne’s wedding, as Cherry had hoped he might, wrote her that the authorities at the Red Creek plant had “jumped at him,” and that he was closing up all his affairs at the “Emmy Younger” and had arranged to ship all their household effects direct to the new home.  He knew nothing of Red Creek, except that it was a small inland town in the San Joachim region, but Cherry’s delight at the thought of any alternative for the “Emmy Younger” was a revelation to Alix.  Martin told his wife generously that he hoped she would stay with her father until the move was accomplished, and Cherry, with a clear conscience, established herself in her old room.  She wrote constantly to her husband and often spoke appreciatively of Mart’s kindness.

Anne’s marriage took place in mid-September.  It was a much more formal and elaborate affair than Cherry’s had been, because, as Anne explained, “Frenny’s people have been so generous about giving him up, you know.  After all, he’s the last of the Littles; all the others are Folsoms and Randalls.  And I want them to realize that he is marrying a gentlewoman!”

The older Littles and all the Folsoms and Randalls came to the wedding, self-respecting, thrifty people who were, for the most part, as Alix summarized it, “buying little homes on the installment plan in desirable residential districts of Oakland and Berkeley.”  There were bright-faced school teachers, in dark plaid silk waists, and young matrons in carefully planned colour schemes of brown and gray; and they all told Alix and Cherry about the family, the members who were daughters of the Revolution, and the members who belonged to the Society of the Daughters of Officers of the Civil War.