Ethel Morton and the Christmas Ship

BY MABELL S. C. SMITH M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY CHICAGO NEW YORK
Made in U. S. A.

THE UNITED SERVICE CLUB AT HOME
IT'S up to Roger Morton to admit that there's real, true romance in the world after all, decided Margaret Hancock as she sat on the Mortons' porch one afternoon a few days after school had opened in the September following the summer when the Mortons and Hancocks had met for the first time at Chautauqua. James and Margaret had trolleyed over to see Roger and Helen from Glen Point, about three quarters of an hour's ride from Rosemont where the Mortons lived.
Roger's ready to admit it, confessed that young man. When you have an aunt drop right down on your door mat, so to speak, after your family has been hunting her for twenty years, and when you find that you've been knowing her daughter, your own cousin, pretty well for two months it does make the regular go-to-school life that you and I used to lead look quite prosy.
How did she happen to lose touch so completely with her family?
I told you how Grandfather Morton, her father, opposed her marrying Uncle Leonard Smith because he was a musician. Well, she did marry him, and when they got into straits she was too proud to tell her father about it.
I suppose Grandfather would have said, 'I told you so,' suggested Helen.
And I believe it takes more courage than it's worth to face a person who's given to saying that, concluded James.
Aunt Louise evidently thought it wasn't worth while or else she didn't have the courage and so she drifted away. Her mother was dead and she had no sisters and Father and Uncle Richard probably didn't write very often.
She thought nobody at home loved her, I suppose, said Helen. Father and Uncle Richard did love her tremendously, but they were just young fellows at the time and they didn't realize what their not writing meant to her.