don't you do the wash and all the work and the beds and sweep, and just have a kimono and we go barefoot? Then we could have a motor-car just like everybody in the world has one."
It was at this point that Tom's mother appeared.
"Good morning, Alice," she said, "and what's my darling Sara doing?"
"I've been having a lovely, lovely talk with my mother!" fluted Sara.
From the other room came an all too familiar rumbling noise. Alice knew very well that Jamie had turned chairs upside down and was playing motor-cars. Then her ears were rent by a sound something between a watchman's rattle and the squawk of a dying fowl. Her already frayed nerves gave way. She jumped to her feet and descended on Jamie.
"What, in heaven's name," she cried, "is that awful, awful noise?"
"It's my motor horn," he returned blithely.
"Give it to me at once," commanded Alice; "whoever gave you that thing is a lunatic!"
"I'm that lunatic," Mrs. Marcey here proclaimed with firm displeasure; "the darling has such a touching devotion to motors that when he so admired that little motor horn I bought it for the dear child. I don't know what we're coming to, the way women's nerves of this generation jump at every little thing! Why, I can remember perfectly when my brother and I had a fife and drum corps and used to drum and toot on penny whistles all day long—and my mother was glad to hear me do it—she knew then that I wasn't breaking a limb somewhere, and that my hands were out of mischief. The time when my mother used to jump was when she couldn't hear my drum."
It was just after the departure of her mother-in-law,
