IT was not long after this that Tom's mother and Alice took leave of each other with a courtesy that bordered on stiffness, the older lady flinging back the word from beneath her flaunting parasol:
"Well, as you know, Alice, I still belong to that world which believes that girls should be girls and women, women."
Alice told Tom when he returned in the evening, "All I'm trying to get and all that Sara is trying to get, as far as I can see, is a little natural outdoor exercise with other children. If other women bring their daughters up as little prigs, as stationary as any built-in washtub, I can't help myself."
"That's all right, my dear," Tom Marcey agreed with her; "but boys have hated from all time to have girls tagging after them. Don't ask me why. They always have and I suppose they always will. And," he went on, "if anybody had talked mistletoe to me I would have gone and buried myself—any natural boy would."
Robert, who unfortunately had sauntered along at his father's closing remark, capped it off with:
"Yes, and right in spring, too! If it had happened around Christmas when people do have it strung up, it would 'a' been different. But just now!"
It was the unseasonableness of Sara's dream that constituted one of its worst features in her brother's mind. Dreams of mistletoe and holly and Santa Claus and stockings occurring round about Christmas, or dreams of fire-crackers or flags occurring round about the
