"How lonesome they must leave you? H'm! is it the Michigan Avenue
Property Owners assessing you again to fight the choo-choo cars?"
Her father shook his head and almost laughed.
"Is it The Wives of the Presidents'? Is it 'The Mothers of Great Men'?"
"What a girl!" he said, and laughed aloud. It seemed as if he wanted to laugh.
She eyed him narrowly. "There's only one thing more I can think of," she declared, screwing up her mouth and her eyes. "But I sha'n't ask you that—it's too silly. If I imagined for a moment that you could be thinking about old Mother Van Horn—"
She paused. Her father cast down his eyes half guiltily.
"Don't say you are, pa. That would be too absurd. You, with all the important things you have to carry in your head, to waste a minute on that frowzy old hag! It isn't worth it; it's nonsense."
"I don't know whether it is or not," responded her father, slowly. He passed a careful hand through the fringe of the chair. "That's what I'd like to find out."
"Oh, fiddlesticks!" rejoined Jane. "You sha'n't sit poking here in the dark and thinking of any such thing as that—not another minute. Come in and hear Dick tell how those students in Paris tied him to the wall and daubed him all red and green, and what he did to get even. That's worth while. And you haven't seen Aunt Lyddy yet, have you? So is that—isn't it? Then come along, do."