-room. Round her swirled the heat from the
stove, and restless flies lighted on her cheek and flew off at hectic
tangents.

Father tiptoed up to her, smiling. "I've left the door open wide enough
so you can see them," he whispered. "Come and take a look at them. Mrs.
Vance Carter--gee! And her daughter's a mighty pretty girl--not that I
think much of these blouses that are cut so low and all."

"Oh, I wouldn't dare--"

Mother stopped short. Quiet as they were, they could distinctly hear
the voices from the other room.

The Carter girl--she who was known as "Pig Carter" at Miss Severance's
school--was snapping, "What in the world ever made you come to this
frightful hole, mama?"

"Simply because I wanted to stop some place, and I really can't stand
that mincing Miss Mitchin and her half-baked yearners and that odious
creature with the beard and the ballet skirt, again."

"At least Mitchin's shop is better than this awful place. Why, this
might be one of those railroad lunch-rooms you see from a train."

"I'm not so sure this really is worse than the Mitchin creature's zoo,
Marky. At least this is a perfect study in what not to do. I fancy it
would be a good thing for every interior decorator to come here and
learn what to avoid. And, you know, they really might have done
something with this place--rather a decent old house, with a good plain
fireplace. But then, any one could make a charming room, and only a
genius could have imagined this combination--an oak dining-room chair
with a wicker table and a cotton table-cloth. I'm sure that Exhibition
of Bad Taste--wasn't it? I don't pore over the newspapers as you
do--that they held in New York would have been charmed to secure that
picture of the kittens and the infant."

All this, conveyed in the Carters' clear, high-bred voices, Father and
Mother heard perfectly.... The picture of kittens and a baby they had
bought just after Lulu's birth, and it had always hung above the couch
in their living-room in New York.

Margaret Carter was continuing: "I don't mind the bad taste a bit, but I
was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea.
If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance's
you could stand even sticky kitties--in a picture. I don't care about
the interior decoration as long as Marky's little interior gets
decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why,
even Miss Severance's horrid Ceylo