The more Vance burgeoned out as the town beau, the more depressed Papa became. Grandma Reed told the girls she hadn’t heard Harry laugh since the night he and Ed Hartwell came to see her. Papa said it wasn’t up to the manager of a funiture and funeral parlor to go round laughing at every little thing. The fact was that laughing took your mind off business and a fellow pushing forty didn’t feel much like laughing anyway. At his age a man with Papa’s responsible position had to watch his step. He got disgusted with these flybrains that ran around town with out-of-town girls, or went on excursions to Cedar Point with ladies who were far from wives. It was a shame, honest to God, to see some of these men his own age get into a room at the London Junction Hotel and drink and play poker all night. You could tell they didn’t have the right kind of wife and home. Papa said the young women were getting worse all the time, too. He could see them passing the Store on Saturday nights, letting some fellow hold on to their round, bare arm, knowing damn well what he’d be after next, but these modern girls didn’t seem to care. He said when he walked home late Saturday nights from the Store he could hear the couples spooning and giggling on the dark porches, sometimes lying down together in the hammocks. No yelling of “Now, now, stop! Now, I warn you. Stop, I say!” with which any decent woman repelled a man’s vulgar approaches. It made Papa shocked to find that there were so many girls in town who let these young fellows get away with murder. Take the family that lived in the double house on Fourth where he and Daisy used to live. The daughter there wasn’t much older than Lena, but she had some fellow kissing her on the porch and playing the banjo every night. If Papa had been the girl’s father he’d kick the chap out before he got her in trouble.

This was Papa’s new moral attitude brought about by Vance’s presence in the house, and Vance’s doing all the things Papa used to like to do. But the really staggering blow came when Papa and wife and four daughters came home from Minelda’s baptism at church one evening and found Vance sitting on the front porch with Bonnie Purdy and another couple. Papa turned pale and could not even speak for a minute in answer to Bonnie’s teasing “Hello, stranger.” The girls flung themselves on Bonnie rapturously till Papa harshly ordered them to go indoors.

“Can we sit in the parlor while Bonnie is here?” Florrie asked eagerly. This innocent betrayal of her stepmother’s rules annoyed both Her and Papa, especially since Bonnie laughingly said, “Isn’t she darling? As if it wasn’t her own home!”

After this remark there was nothing to be done but invite the whole group into the parlor, where Bonnie gayly played the piano for Vance to sing, and the girls sat, carefully motionless so as not to spoil anything, on the sofa. Papa wouldn’t look at Bonnie, because Vance sat on the piano bench with his arm around her.