“I don’t doubt what you say is true, Marian, but Ernest is gone, and you don’t know what a wrench it is going to be to send my baby away, too.”
“Are you thinking of sending her next year?”
“I think I must, unless I can persuade Father to move to town for the winter so she can go to the High School. It isn’t merely the studies–I am most dissatisfied with her associations here.”
“I know–the Creek is certainly a little crude. Still I think Jane is pretty sensible. And she is learning a lot about human nature–human nature without its party clothes. It’s good for her, Mother, if she doesn’t get too much of it.”
341“What’s good for whom?” Dr. Morton, coming in, was attracted by Marian’s earnest tone.
“Jane, and the effect District Thirteen is having on her,” Marian explained.
“I was just saying, Father, that she is getting too old to be associating with Tom, Dick, and Harry the way she is doing up at the schoolhouse.”
“There you go again, Mother. You don’t go about enough among the neighbors to know what good kindly people they are. Of course, they are plain, but the Tom, Dick, and Harry you complain of, are more wholesome than lots of more stylish youngsters I know. I wish you’d try to be a little more neighborly. I am constantly hearing little thrusts about our family being stuck up. Frank will bear me out in this.”
Frank had followed his father and was warming his hands in the blaze.
“Oh, the Creek thinks the Morton family has a good opinion of itself, all right. But I have been thinking for some time that it wouldn’t hurt us any to have some sort of a merry-making and invite all the neighbors in.” Frank looked at Marian.