abies."

"The first I knew that babies were disgraceful. Why, Sarah, you, with
your five, how disgraceful you have been. Billy and I have decided not
to be half as disgraceful. We're only going to have two--a boy and a
girl."

Tom chuckled, but held the peace by hiding his face in his coffee cup.
Sarah, though checked by this flank attack, was herself an old hand
in the art. So temporary was the setback that she scarcely paused ere
hurling her assault from a new angle.

"An' marryin' so quick, all of a sudden, eh? If that ain't suspicious,
nothin' is. I don't know what young women's comin' to. They ain't
decent, I tell you. They ain't decent. That's what comes of Sunday
dancin' an' all the rest. Young women nowadays are like a lot of
animals. Such fast an' looseness I never saw...."

Saxon was white with anger, but while Sarah wandered on in her diatribe,
Tom managed to wink privily and prodigiously at his sister and to
implore her to help in keeping the peace.

"It's all right, kid sister," he comforted Saxon when they were alone.
"There's no use talkin' to Sarah. Bill Roberts is a good boy. I know a
lot about him. It does you proud to get him for a husband. You're bound
to be happy with him..." His voice sank, and his face seemed suddenly to
be very old and tired as he went on anxiously. "Take warning from Sarah.
Don't nag. Whatever you do, don't nag. Don't give him a perpetual-motion
line of chin. Kind of let him talk once in a while. Men have some horse
sense, though Sarah don't know it. Why, Sarah actually loves me, though
she don't make a noise like it. The thing for you is to love your
husband, and, by thunder, to make a noise of lovin' him, too. And then
you can kid him into doing 'most anything you want. Let him have his way
once in a while, and he'll let you have yourn. But you just go on lovin'
him, and leanin' on his judgement--he's no fool--and you'll be all
hunky-dory. I'm scared from goin' wrong, what of Sarah. But I'd sooner
be loved into not going wrong."

"Oh, I'll do it, Tom," Saxon nodded, smiling through the tears his
sympathy had brought into her eyes. "And on top of it I'm going to do
something else, I'm going to make Billy love me and just keep on loving
me. And then I won't have to kid him into doing some of the things I
want. He'll do them because he loves me, you see."

"You got the right idea, Saxon. Stick with it, an' you'll win out."

Later, when she had put on her hat to start for