years
before that--or ever since, as she put it, "the juice got pore George."
Mrs. Tolley loved every inch of Kirkwood; for her it was the captured
dream.

Min Tolley, sitting next to her mother, loved Kirkwood, too, because
she was going to marry Harry Garvey, who was one of the shift bosses at
the plant. Harry sat next to Min. Then came her brother Roosy, ten
years old; and then the Hopps--Mrs. Lou, and little Lou, spattering
rice and potato all over himself and his chair, and big Lou, silently,
deeply admiring them both. Then there were two empty chairs, for the
Chisholms, the resident manager and superintendent and his sister, at
the end of the table; and then Joe Vorse, the switchboard operator, and
his little wife; and then Monk White, another shift boss; and lastly,
at Mrs. Tolley's left, Paul Forster, newly come from New York to be Mr.
Chisholm's stenographer and assistant.

Paul was the first to leave the table that night. He drank his coffee
in three savage gulps, pushed back his crumpled napkin, and rose. "If
you'll excuse me--" he began.

"You're cert'n'y excusable!" said Mrs. Tolley, elegantly--adding, when
the door had closed behind him: "And leave me tell you right now that
somebody was real fond of children to raise YOU!"

"An' I'm not planning to spend the heyday of my girlhood ironing
napkins for you, Pauly Pet!" said Min, reaching for his discarded
napkin and folding it severely into a wooden ring.

Paul did not hear these remarks, but he heard the laughter that greeted
them, and he scowled as he selected a rocker on the front porch. He put
his feet up on the rail, felt in one pocket for tobacco, in another for
papers, and in a third for his match-case, and set himself to the
congenial task of composing a letter in which he should resign from the
employ of the Light and Power Company. It was a question of a broken
contract, so it must be diplomatically worded. Paul had spent the five
evenings since his arrival at Kirkwood in puzzling over the phrasing of
that letter.

Below the porch, the hillside, covered with scrub-oak and chaparral and
madrono trees, and the stumps where redwoods had been, dropped sharply
to the little river, which came tumbling down from the wooded mountains
to plunge roaring into one end of the big power-house, and which foamed
out at the other side to continue its mad rush down the valley. The
power-house, looming up an immense crude outline in the twilight,
rested on t