“But you do imagine. You imagine reapers and binders and three-point suspensions all safe for children to play with. When do you leave?”

“As soon after commencement as possible.”

“I congratulate you on Gratia’s friendship,” said Cynthia heartily.

“I had very little to do with it,” answered Gratia coldly.—She sat with perfect self-possession, an exquisite girlish figure in a very simple and very expensive white dress.—“All that I did was to write a note. I wrote my father that Jimmy was the best all round man in the class of 1915.”

Marvin threw her a kiss across the table. “You did just right! In five years Jimmy will be general manager of the Ferry plant.”

Jimmy could always find his tongue when given undue credit. “I’m no mathematician at all when compared with Marvin, and I shall never be manager of the Ferry plant if I live to be a hundred.”

Mrs. Hogg cut the mutual admiration short. She lifted her soup spoon and remarked, “I think we need not anticipate. Mr. Ferry is known to be a judge of men.”

“He’s not a judge of Germans!” cried Cynthia.

Mrs. Hogg pinched the soup spoon with her gouty fingers.

“Cynthia, you are a young girl, and it ill becomes you to criticise a distinguished man of affairs. I abhor the Germans since what happened on the seventh of last month, but I don’t believe all that I read in the papers.”

A moment of serious silence ensued, and then Mrs. Hogg tempered her rebuke.

“Cynthia, you are carrying off all the honors in music. Won’t you play for us after dinner?”

“Of course I will. But it is so warm that you folks had better sit out on the porch. Marvin will turn the leaves for me.”

This was exactly what Mrs. Hogg wanted. In due time she led the way to the porch, to one end of which Jimmy immediately carried Gratia off.

Cynthia struck into a polonaise, not caring whether the porch listened or not. In the tumult of the polonaise Mrs. Hogg began calmly to talk to Kate. Her subject was what she called her junk, by which she meant certain securities which had been charged up to profit and loss. One was a stock certificate for some abandoned land in northern Michigan, and she wondered whether the region might not 

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