It was chilly that evening in the old rooms of the house with three windows in the roof; Roger Kenney’s father and mother sat near the grate in the front parlor; curtains and portieres were dropped, the piano lamp with its crimson silk shade threw a glow over the two faces sitting in cosy content opposite each other. The house was still; the girls, Martha and Lou, and the two boys, Maurice and John, had gone down town to an illustrated lecture on India; the maid had her evening out; even Nip, the house-dog, had gone out for an evening ramble; the two “old people,” as in their early sixties they loved to call each other, were alone with each other and a new anxiety.
Mr. Kenney told his wife that nothing in the world made her quite so happy as a new worry, and he wished he could get one for her oftener.
“This will do for awhile,” she remarked; “but this isn’t as bad as that old trouble of Marion’s; a man can work himself out; and Roger has work enough on hand for two worries.”
“Now, what are you going to do about this?” inquired her husband, folding the evening’s paper and laying it upon his knee. “You sent Marion to Bensalem for her charm; will you get Roger away for his?”
“That would do no good,” she replied, discontentedly, “he would not be got away in the first place, and Judith is not a fixture in Bensalem.”
“Judith is worth having,” was the complacent reply.
“That’s the worst of it. So was Don Mackenzie.”
“It’s the best of it, I think. You wouldn’t have your boys and girls carried away by somebody not worth having.”
“But, then, being disappointed in somebody might help them bear it, and turn them around to look at somebody else.”
“A disappointment like that is poor consolation.”