“Yes--Isabel.”
“Yes. Martin, he goes in to see her at Lancaster real often and he’s all the time talkin’ about her and wantin’ we should meet her. She has him to supper--ach, they call it dinner--but it’s what they eat in the evening. I just said to his pop we’ll ask her out here to see us once and find out what for girl she is. From what Martin says she’s a little tony and got money and lots of fine things. You know Martin is the kind can suit himself to most any kind of people. He can make after every place he goes, even if they do put on style. So mebbe she thinks Martin’s from tony people, too. But when she comes here she can see that we’re just plain country people. I don’t put no airs on, but I did say I’d like to have things nice so that she can’t laugh at us, for I’d pity Martin if she did that. Mebbe you know how to set the things on the table a little more like they do now. It’s so long since I ate any place tony. I said we’d eat in the room, too, and not in the kitchen. We always eat in the kitchen for it’s big and handy and nice and cool with all the doors and windows open. But I’ll carry things in the room to-night. It will please Martin if we have things nice for his girl.”
“Um-huh, Martin’s got a girl!” sang Charlie gleefully.
“Yes,” spoke up Johnny, a little older and wiser than Charlie. “I know he’s got a girl. He’s got a big book in his room and I seen him once look in it and pick up something out of it and look at it like it was something worth a whole lot. I sneaked in after he went off and what d’you think it was? Nothing at all but one of them pink lady-slippers we find in the woods near the schoolhouse! He pressed it in that book and acted like it was something precious, so I guess his girl give it to him.”
Amanda remembered the pink lady-slipper. She had seen Isabel give it to Martin that spring day when the city girl’s glowing face had smiled over the pink azaleas, straight into the eyes of the country boy.
“Charlie,” chided Mrs. Landis, “don’t you be pokin’ round in Martin’s room. And don’t you tell him what you saw. He’d be awful put out. He don’t like to be teased. Ach, my,” she shook her head and smiled to Amanda, “with so many children it makes sometimes when they all get talkin’ and cuttin’ up or scrappin’.”
“But it’s a lively, merry place. I always like to come here.”
“Do you, now? Well, I like to have you. I often say to Martin that you’re like a streak of sunshine comin’ on a winter day, always so happy and full of fun, it does abody good to have you around. Ach"--in answer to a whisper from the six-year-old baby, “yes, well, go take a few cookies. Only put the lid on the crock tight again so the cookies will keep fresh. Now I guess I better look after my short cake once. Mister likes everything baked brown. Then I guess we’ll set the table if you don’t mind tellin’ me a little how.”
“I’ll be glad to.”
While Mrs. Landis went up-stairs to get her very best table-cloth Amanda looked about the room with its plain country furnishings, its hominess and yet utter lack of real artistry in decoration. Her heart rebelled. What business had a girl like Isabel Souders to enter a family like the Landis’s? She’d like to bet that the city girl would disdain the dining-room with its haircloth sofa along one wall and its organ in one corner, its quaint, silk-draped mantel where two vases of Pampas grass hobnobbed with an antique pink and white teapot and two pewter plates; its lack of buffet or fashionable china closet, its old, low-backed, cane-seated walnut chairs round a table, long of necessity to hold plates for so large a family.