OF COURSE they had had lots of dinner parties before, but none so important as this evening's, because Mr. Donner was coming, and Joe said they must make a good impression on him—he could be so helpful in a business way. He was interested in mines—silver mines. Kate would have been more impressed if they had been gold mines, silver seemed rather half-hearted; but she could see that Joe, who usually entertained his guests as easily as a blossoming apple tree entertains the bees, was really nervous about to-night.
That was why everything was going wrong, she thought, pulling the rather frost-bitten chrysanthemums out of their bowl and beginning to rearrange them. They had looked pretty in Miss Smith's back yard, springing and looping in a twilight dim with the smoke of autumn bonfires; she could make them sound pretty in her mind. "Sprays of copper and cream-colored hardy chrysanthemums." But here, in a silver bowl on the dinner table, they just looked stiff and scrubby.
That was the way she looked, too, she thought, struggling up through the orange-pink corded silk. Not a bit of color in her face, between those two sunset clouds of sleeves, and her hair as dull as if she'd
