“Have the Days been invited?” quickly inquired Frank.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” snapped his sister impatiently. “Goodness! that big, fat woman would be a sight on the floor—you know it. She dresses like an Italian sunset.”
“They’ve got a span of good horses,” said Frank firmly, “and a roomy double-seated sleigh. If they are invited they might ask me to go with them,” said the foxy engineer.
For Marty had expressed a desire to go to the dance, and said that his mother was fairly crazy to attend; but that no invitation from the Slaters had come to the Day house. Annette saw when she was beaten, and the very next day the belated invitation arrived for “Mr. Jason Day and family.”
Of course, Uncle Jason would not attend. Somebody had to stay at home and take care of the stock, and keep the fires up in the kitchen and sitting-room stoves. For the thermometer was below zero and wood fires have to be frequently tended. But Aunt ’Mira declared she was going if she had to walk!
“Well, yeou’d manage ter keep up a gentle perspiration, I reckon, if you walked clean from here to Slater’s, Almiry,” drawled Uncle Jason. “And I see by that book on physical culture ye got upstairs thet the doctors advise that so as ter help git flesh off a body. My soul! if you cut all the capers that’s pictered out in thet there book to try an’ git off your fat, it’d tickle me more’n a case of hives ter see ye—it sartain would!”
Aunt ’Mira was not to be ridiculed out of her attempts to get the best of her too fleshy figure. She studied the physical culture book as faithfully as she did the fashion magazines. One day, the family sitting downstairs, felt the whole house jar as though the foundations had suddenly settled. Uncle Jason and Marty stared at each other.
“Never heard a tree burst in the forest so early in the winter in my life before, I vum!” declared Uncle Jason.
“That warn’t no tree bustin’,” returned his son. “It must be blastin’ up to the marble quarries. An’ it was some blast, at that!”
“Why, Marty,” said his father, “they don’t work in the marble quarries in the winter. You know that well enough, son—I snum! there it is again!”