ot of goodly size.

"Peace! Withdraw that battering ram!" pleaded Roger. "I'll tell you
all about it. Tom's really responsible for this idea, anyway."

"Ideas, real fresh ones, aren't much in my line," admitted practical
Tom, "but I'm glad to have helped for once."

"I don't suppose you remember that time last autumn when I went in to
New York to see you and you took me down to the chapel where your
father preaches on Sunday afternoons?"

"I remember it; we found Father there talking with a lot of mothers and
children."

"That's the time. Well, those women and children got on my nerves like
anything. You see, out here in Rosemont we haven't any real suffering
like that. There are poor people, and Mother always does what she can
for them, and there's a Charitable Society, as you know, because you
all helped with the Donnybrook Fair they had on St. Patrick's Day. But
the people they help out here are regular Rockefellers compared with
those poor creatures that your father had in his office that day."

"Father says he could spend a million dollars a year on those people,
and not have a misspent cent," said Delia.

"What hit me hardest was the thin little children. Elisabeth hadn't
come to us yet," Roger went on, referring to a Belgian baby that had
been sent to the Club to take care of, "and I wasn't so accustomed to
thinness as I've grown to be since, and it made me--well, it just made
me sick."

"I don't wonder," agreed Delia seriously. "That's the way they make me
feel."

"I know what you thought of," exclaimed Ethel Blue, who was so
imaginative and sympathetic that she sometimes had an almost uncanny
way of reading peoples' thoughts. "You wanted to bring some of those
poor women out into the country so that the children could get well,
and you told your grandfather about it and he offered you a house
somewhere."

"That's about it, kidlet. I heard one of the women say that she'd had
a week in the country--some sort of Fresh Air business--and that the
baby got a lot better, and then she had to go back to the city and the
little creature was literally dying on her hands."

"You want to give them a whole summer," guessed Ethel Brown.

"That's the idea. Since I've seen what proper care and good food and
fresh air have done for that wretched little skeleton, Elisabeth, I'm
more than ever convinced that if we can give some of those mothers and
babies a whole month or perhaps two months of Rosemont a