Abbie Deal was embarrassed beyond measure. She was used to the girl’s wild talk before her own people, but she did not dream Kathie would keep it up when the young man came. Abbie looked at him. He was not disgusted. He was looking at Katherine with approbation and liking . . . even admiration. He liked her flippant talk. The young man, himself, liked it. Well, she gave up. She washed her hands of the present generation. They were away beyond her.

Katherine put on a rose-pink apron which she had brought with evident forethought, and winked openly at her respective progenitors as she carried in the food.

They ate the palatable if simple dinner together,—this rather incongruous little group, after which Katherine said demurely, “Now, Jimmie and I’ll wash the dishes, won’t we, Jimmie?” Which was something of an astonishing innovation in itself, as, heretofore, dish-washing had not been one of Katherine’s favorite indoor sports.

A half-hour later, Abbie and Sarah went into the kitchen, just as Katherine was hanging up her dishpan. “Everything all right, Granny?” she wanted to know.

“Why, I think so, Katherine. It looks very nice.”

“Neat little Jane, am I not?” She grinned brazenly at Abbie Deal, who immediately reddened for her.

“Well, Sarah,” said Abbie when they were alone, “my mother blushed and gave my father a rose by a well on the Scottish moors. I cried on Will’s shoulder in an old honey-locust lane. Mack courted Emma after church and singing-school. And Kathie . . . Kathie goes out and gets her man.”

Sarah Lutz laughed. “After all, Abbie, there’s something honest about it and frank and aboveboard.”

Abbie put the butter-crock back into the big white refrigerator. “Sarah,” she said, “it may be honest and it may be frank and it may be aboveboard,—but it’s not subtle and it’s not romantic and it’s not artistic.”

Sarah Lutz’s bright black eyes twinkled behind her shell-rimmed glasses. “If you’re not all wet, old lady,” she said solemnly, . . . “you’ve said a mouthful.”

CHAPTER XXXI

Abbie made her usual extensive preparations for Christmas that year. The daughters and daughters-in-law said a great deal against her using up so much energy. “But you might as well talk to the wind,” Grace wrote to Isabelle. “There’s something stubborn about Mother. She is bound to go through with all that mince-meat, doughnut, pop-corn-ball ordeal even if she’s sick in bed afterward. Margaret wants us to come there to save her all that work, and Emma and Eloise have both offered their homes, too, but she won’t listen. ‘No,’ she says, ‘as long as I’m here, the Christmas gathering is here.’ I’ve tried to tell her over and over that conditions have changed, that we don’t live out on an isolated prairie any more; that she doesn’t make one thing that she couldn’t buy, but she just won’t catch up with the times. ‘They’re not so full of the Christmas spirit when you don’t fix them yourself,’ she says. Isn’t that the last word in old-fashioned ideas?” So the clan came once more to the old farmhouse behind the cedars. Grace was the first to arrive in her own roadster, coming over the graveled highway from Wesleyan University. The others arrived at various times before Christmas eve. Mack and Emma, Donald and Katherine came. Only Stanley was missing from the Mack Deal family. Having married, Stanley had discovered that a wife’s people must also be reckoned with. Margaret and Dr. Fred Baker, Dr. Fred, Jr., and his wife and two little boys came. Isabelle and Harrison Rhodes got in from Chicago on the afternoon train, the road boasting a flyer now instead of the old baggage-and-day affair of the time when the children were small. John and Eloise, Wentworth and Laura and Millard, who was eight now, all came over from their home on the other side of Cedartown in time for the evening meal. Every car was loaded to the doors with packages.