liness in entertaining, since there
were no matinees or shows to visit. Both hostess and guest were expected
to contribute of their best.

Madam Wetherill had long been a well-to-do widow and conducted her large
estate with ability, though she employed a sort of overseer or
confidential clerk. She had inherited a good deal in her own right from
the Wardours and sundry English relatives. Some of the Wetherills were
of the Quaker persuasion, but her husband had wandered a little from the
fold. She had been a Churchwoman, and still considered herself so, but
she was of a very independent turn, and on her last visit to England had
come home rather affronted with the light esteem in which many professed
to hold the colonies.

"They talk as if we were a set of ignoramuses," she declared in high
dudgeon. "We are worthy of nothing but the tillage of fields and
whatever industries the will of the mother country directs. Are we,
their own offspring, to be always considered children and servants, and
have masters appointed over us without any say of our own? We can build
ships. Why can we not trade with any port in the world? What if we have
raised up no Master Chaucer nor Shakspere nor Ben Jonson, nor wise Lord
Bacon and divers storytellers--did England do this in her early years
when she was hard bestead with the hordes from the Continent? We have
had to make our way against Indian savages, and did we not conquer the
French in our mother's behalf? And then to be set down as ignorant
children, forsooth, and told what we must do and from what we must
refrain. The colonies have outgrown swaddling-clothes!"

But she was fond of gayety and pleasure as well, and having no children
to place in the world and no really near kindred but first and second
cousins she saw no need of being penurious, and lived with a free hand.
She was very fond of young people also, and it seemed a great pity she
had not been mother of a family. Her city house was a great rendezvous,
and her farmhouse was the stopping place of many a gay party, and often
a crowd to supper with a good deal of impromptu dancing afterward.

The porch was full of young people now, with two or three men in
military costume, so they drove around to the side entrance. Mistress
Janice was busy ordering refreshments and making a new kind of frozen
custard. A pleasant-faced, youngish woman came to receive them.

"Here is the little Quaker, Patty, in her homespun gown. I might as w