So the packing was finished, a suitable house was found—modern, with reasonable rent—on Maple Avenue where the oaks were most magnificent, and the parsonage family became just ordinary "folks," a parsonage household no longer.
"You must be very patient with us if we still try to run things," Carol said apologetically to the president of the Ladies' Aid. "We've been a parsonage bunch all our lives, you know, and it's got to be a habit. But we'll be as easy on you as we can. We know what it would mean to leave two ministers' families down on you at once."
Mr. Starr's new position necessitated long and frequent absences from home, and that was a drawback to the family comradeship. But the girls' pride in his advancement was so colossal, and their determination to live up to the dignity of the eldership was so deep-seated, that affairs ran on quite serenely in the new home.
"Aren't we getting sensible?" Carol frequently asked her sisters, and they agreed enthusiastically that they certainly were.
"I don't think we ever were so bad as we thought we were," Lark said. "Even Prudence says now that we were always pretty good. Prudence ought to think so. She got most of our spending money for a good many years, didn't she?"
"Prudence didn't get it. She gave it to the heathen."
"Well, she got credit for it on the Lord's accounts, I suppose. But she deserved it. It was no joke collecting allowances from us."
One day this beautiful serenity was broken in upon in a most unpleasant way. Carol looked up from De Senectute and flung out her arms in an all-relieving yawn. Then she looked at her aunt, asleep on the couch. She looked at Lark, who was aimlessly drawing feathers on the skeletons of birds in her biology text. She looked at Connie, sitting upright in her chair, a small book close to her face, alert, absorbed, oblivious to the world. Connie was wide awake, and Carol resented it.
"What are you reading, Con?" she asked reproachfully.
Connie looked up, startled, and colored a little. "Oh,—poetry," she stammered.