CHAPTER X
UNEXPECTED VISITORS
Madeline composed the Masque of the Christmas Stockings in the first frenzy of her enthusiasm, and then, declaring that genius wouldn’t burn any more, she left the Pageant of Twelfth Night Cakes until so late that Betty was in despair; and she persistently forgot the Christmas Stockings’ rehearsals until Babbie, rallying to the honor of the Tally-ho, took them in charge.
“Don’t you wish you were going to stay for the party?” Mr. Thayer asked her, at her last rehearsal, while Madeline, who had come to take over the reins again, was giving her final directions to the children. In the intervals of the rehearsal, she had scribbled off some songs and speeches for the Cakes, which were so clever that Babbie had been compelled to drop what Madeline had wickedly dubbed her Perfect Manner and laugh heartily over them, as she and Mr. Thayer read them together. Her Perfect Manner was quite different from the one that she had hastily called perfect on the day of her first visit to the stocking factory. Madeline had written the other B’s about it, describing it deftly as “Sweetness from a Long Way off.”
So now Babbie answered with distant courtesy, “Of course I’m very much interested in the party, but I shouldn’t think of not going home for Christmas.”
“Oh, certainly not,” Mr. Thayer agreed hastily. “I shouldn’t either, only I haven’t been sufficiently urged. I had a letter from my father yesterday saying that the laws I got passed last month by the state legislature were going to ruin him, so now I’m not even expecting a present.”
“Why do you go to work and have laws passed that your father doesn’t like?” inquired Babbie severely.
“You wouldn’t want me to have any passed that could possibly please him, would you?” Mr. Thayer retorted, and when he caught the flicker of interest in Babbie’s eyes he went on, “You see, Miss Hildreth, my father has the wrong point of view. He always thinks of the dollars, where he ought to think of the workers. He holds to the old-fashioned theory that the man who toils hasn’t any feelings. He’s never seen any of his factories. He sits in an office in New York, at a shiny mahogany desk with twenty nice little pigeonholes in it, one for each of his factories. When a manager’s report shows fat profits, he smiles and tucks it into its pigeon-hole. If the profits go down, he sends for the manager—or bounces him without sending for him. When I left college he gave me a pigeon-hole.”
“This factory, you mean?” asked Babbie.
“Not at first. He’s changed my pigeon-hole several times. First he gave me a mill in South Carolina, and I went down and wrote about the appalling conditions there for one of the prominent magazines.”
“That was rather unkind of you, wasn’t it,” Babbie demanded, “when he’d just given you the factory?”