temperature of the water with my elbow; and I
know my mother used to test my bath-water when I was a baby by putting
me into it. She used to say that if I turned blue she knew the water
was too cold, and if I turned red she knew it was too hot."

"Humph!" snorted the blue-and-white striped nurse, and rightly.

"Oh, I don't say that your method isn't the proper one," Emma hastened
to say humbly, and watched Grace scrutinize the bath-thermometer with
critical eye.

In the days that followed, there came calling the mothers of Grace's
young-women friends, as Jock had predicted. Charming elderly women,
most of them, all of them gracious and friendly with that generous
friendliness which is of the West. But each fell into one of two
classes--the placid, black-silk, rather vague woman of middle age,
whose face has the blank look of the sheltered woman and who wrinkles
early from sheer lack of sufficient activity or vital interest in life;
and the wiry, well-dressed, assertive type who talked about her club
work and her charities, her voice always taking the rising inflection
at the end of a sentence, as though addressing a meeting. When they
met Emma, it was always with a little startled look of surprise,
followed by something that bordered on disapproval. Emma, the keenly
observant, watching them, felt vaguely uncomfortable. She tried to be
politely interested in what they had to say, but she found her thoughts
straying a thousand miles away to the man whom she loved and who loved
her, to the big, busy factory with its humming machinery and its
capable office staff, to the tasteful, comfortable, spacious house that
she had helped to plan; to all the vital absorbing, fascinating and
constructive interests with which her busy New York life was filled to
overflowing.

So she looked smilingly at the plump, gray-haired ladies who came
a-calling in their smart black with the softening lace-effect at the
throat, and they looked, smiling politely, too, at this slim, erect,
pink-cheeked, bright-eyed woman with the shining golden hair and the
firm, smooth skin, and the alert manner; and in their eyes was that
distrust which lurks in the eyes of a woman as she looks at another
woman of her own age who doesn't show it.

In the weeks of her stay, Emma managed, little by little, to take the
place of second mother in the household. She had tact and finesse and
cleverness enough even for that herculean feat. Grace's pale cheeks