“Well, you sweet good child!” she said, warmly.  “Fred—­here’s Harriet!  Well, my dear, isn’t it fortunate that we were late!  We’d hardly commenced!”

The remaining members of the family now streamed forth:  Fred Davenport, a thin, rather gray man of fifty, with an intelligent face, a worried forehead, and kindly eyes; Julia, a blonde beauty of twelve; Nammy, a fat, sweet boy of five, with a bib on; and Pip, a serious ten-year-old, with black hair and faded blue overalls, and strong little brown hands scrupulously scrubbed to the wrist-bones, where dirt and grime commenced again unabated.  Josephine, the oldest child, continued to dance about the visitor delightedly, but the little thoughtful Julia disappeared, and when presently they all went out to resume the interrupted meal, a place had been set freshly for Harriet, and a clean plate was waiting for her.

“Now, I don’t know whether to take this out and heat it up for you, or whether it’s still hot,” said Linda, beaming from her place at the head of the table.

“I’ll do it!” said Julia, half launched from her chair.

“Oh, Mother, it’s plenty hot enough!” Josephine contended, good naturedly.  Harriet protested against the reheating plan.  It seemed to her the middle of the afternoon, with the blazing, merciless sunlight streaming across the backyards.  She had forgotten that Linda had dinner at half-past six.

“Iced tea!  Oh, don’t you love it?  I could die drinking it!” Julia said, drawing the beverage from off the ice in her glass with Epicurean delight.

“You very probably will!” her father said.  The children laughed hilariously.  Linda put Harriet’s plate before her, and Harriet attacked codfish cakes and boiled potatoes and stewed tomatoes with pieces of pulpy bread in them, with what appetite she could command.  The stewed blueberries that followed were ice-cold, and she enjoyed them as much as the others did.

The talk ranged wholesomely from family to national affairs.  Fred was a newspaper man, one of the submerged many, underpaid, overworked, unheard, yet vaguely gratified through all the long years by the feeling that his groove was not quite the groove of the office, the teller’s desk, or the travelling salesman’s “beat.”  Here in the little suburban town his opinion gained some little weight from the fact that he had been ten years with a New York evening paper.  Fred held vaguely with labour parties, with socialists and single-taxers; his sister-in-law had a somewhat caustic feeling that if Fred had ever given Linda a really capable maid, his opinions might have been more endurable, to her, Harriet, at least.  Linda had had maids, Polack and Swedish girls, and Irish country girls hardly intelligible in speech.  But now she had no maid, she preferred the economy and independence of doing her own housework.