Every time, as soon as we sit down to the table, Grandmother Evarts always begins, officially: 

“Well, Charles Edward, my dear boy, we don’t have you here very often nowadays.  I said to your mother yesterday that it was two whole weeks since you had been to see her.  What have you been doing with yourself lately?”

And when he says, as he always does, “Nothing, grandmother,” I know she’s disappointed, and then she starts in and tells what she has been doing, and Maria—­Maria always manages to be there when we are—­Maria tells what she has been doing, with little side digs at me because I haven’t been pickling or preserving or cleaning.  Once, when I first went there, Maria asked me at dinner what days I had for cleaning.  And I said, as innocently as possible, that I hadn’t any; that I perfectly loathed cleaning, and that we never cleaned at home!  Of course it wasn’t true, but we never talk about it, anyway.  Peter said he nearly shrieked with joy to hear me come out like that.

It was almost as bad as the time I wore that sweet little yellow Empire gown.  It’s a dear, and Lyman Wilde simply raved over it when he painted me in it (not that he can really paint, but he has a touch with everything he does).  I noticed that everybody seemed solemn and queer, but I never dreamed that I was the cause until my mother-in-law came to me afterward, blushing, and told me that Mr. Talbert never allowed any of the family to wear Mother Hubbards around the house.  Mother Hubbards!  I could have moaned.  Well, when I go around there now I never care what I have on, and I never pretend to talk at meals; I just sit and try and make my mind a blank until it’s over.  You have to make your mind a blank if you don’t want to be driven raving crazy by that dining-room.  It has a hideous black-walnut sideboard, an “oil-painting” of pale, bloated fruit on one side, and pale, bloated fish on the other, and a strip of black-and-white marbled oil-cloth below.

I feel sometimes as if I could hardly live until my father-in-law rises from his chair and kisses his wife good-bye before going off to the factory.  She always blushes so prettily when he kisses her—­as if it were for the first time.  Then everybody looks pained when Peter and I just nod at each other as he goes out—­I cannot be affectionate to him before them—­and then, thank Heaven! the rest of us escape from the dining-room.

How Peggy, who has been away from home and seen and done things, can stand it there now as it is, is a continual wonder to me.

Peggy is a dear little thing.  Peter has always been awfully fond of her, but she doesn’t seem to have an idea in her head beyond her clothes and Harry Goward, though she’ll have to have something more to her if she’s going to keep him.  The moment I saw that boy, of course I knew that he had the artistic temperament; I’ve seen so much of it.  He’s the kind that’s