manner. Father could be playful with Mother, but, like
all men who are worth anything, he could be as Olympian as a king or a
woman author or a box-office manager when he was afflicted by young men
who chewed gum and were chatty. He put his gold-bowed eye-glasses on the
end of his nose and looked over them so wealthily that the summerites
were awed and shyly ate their apple-sauce to the last dreg.

Twelve o'clock dinner at the Tubbses' was a very respectable meal, with
roasts and vegetables to which you could devote some skill and energy.
But supper was more like an after-thought, a sort of afternoon tea
without the wrist-watch conversation. It was soon over, the dishes soon
washed, and by seven o'clock the Applebys and Tubbses gathered in the
sacred parlor, where ordinary summerites were not welcome, where the
family crayon-enlargements hung above the green plush settee from
Boston, which was flanked by the teak table which Uncle Joe's Uncle Ira
had brought from China, and the whale's vertebrae without which no
high-caste Cape Cod household is virtuous. With joy and verbal
fireworks, with highly insulting comments on one another's play, began
the annual series of cribbage games--a world's series, a Davis cup
tournament. Doffing his usual tobacco-chewing, collarless, jocose
manner, Uncle Joe reverently took from the what-not the ancestral
cribbage-board, carved from a solid walrus-tooth. They stood about
exclaiming over it, then fell to. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair
is six!" rang out, triumphantly. Finally (as happened every year on the
occasion of their first game), when the men had magnificently won, Mrs.
Tubbs surprised them with refreshments--they would have been jolly well
surprised if she hadn't surprised them--and Father played recent New
York musical comedy songs on his new mouth-organ, stopping to explain
the point of each, whereupon Mother shook her head and said, warningly,
"Now, Father, you be careful what you say. Honestly, I don't know what
the world is coming to, Mrs. Tubbs, the way men carry on nowadays." But
she wasn't very earnest about it because she was gigglingly aware that
Uncle Joe was stealing Mrs. Tubbs's share of the doughnuts.

They were all as hysterical as a girls' school during this annual
celebration. But Father peeped out of the parlor window and saw the lush
moonlight on marsh and field. To Mother, with an awed quiet, "Sarah,
it's moonlight, like it used to be--" The Tubbses se