“By Jove, I can’t tell a story the way she does and that’s a fact,” their father chuckled. “She can raise the hair on your head—even yours—Friend, ha ha! Go ahead, honey, begin.”

Mama took the big chair and crossed her legs under her, tailor-fashion. She looked like a little girl this way, blowing her curly bangs out of her eyes, which were shining wide. The stories she told in a hushed voice were all about ghosts in churchyards, the wind going woo-oo—ooo, the dogs howling in cemeteries, the dead dancing over their graves to violins played by skeleton figures. Papa would wink at Mr. Friend, fat little Mrs. Friend would clutch her husband and gasp, “Oh, my God!” Mr. Friend smoked a pipe and whenever Mama’s voice sank to a whisper as it did when the story approached its climax, he would take the pipe out of his mouth and hold it motionless, shaking his bald head in amazement. Then, as Mama sat back triumphantly, Mr. Friend would chuckle and nudge his wife, “Who believes such things? Amy, you’re crazy! Nobody ever saw such things, don’t be foolish.”

Lena always sat rocking back and forth happily, her blue eyes fixed on her mother’s flushed excited face, pleased that it was a party and that she was the oldest child. For Marcia, however, each word was agony, sowing seed for terror in darkness. She would not be surpassed by Lena, though, so she clenched the arms of her rocker and tried to shut her ears to her mother’s voice. One time, unable to bear the part where the Feet dance by themselves on the treetop, she ran out of the room with her fingers in her ears. Everyone laughed at her, the way they did at Mrs. Friend, so after that she steeled herself to laugh whenever she was frightened. This fooled and pleased her father, who picked her up and held her on his knee.

“Can you beat that?” he exclaimed proudly. “She knows it’s funny, already.”

So Lena laughed, too, but Mrs. Friend continued to be scared, no matter how often she heard the stories, and she always cried, “Oh, my God!” with a frantic clutch at her husband’s arm.

“Do you wonder why I married Daisy?” their father said, arm around his wife. “Why, I’d rather listen to Daisy than go to a show.”

This Lena repeated proudly to Mary Evelyn Stewart who told it to her mother, who said there were no shows in London Junction anyway, which Mary Evelyn then told Lena who told her father, who said angrily that he did not like the idea of his daughter playing with the daughter of a woman who worked in a store. This, in reverse order, went back the same route and so for two or three weeks Mary Evelyn and Lena did not speak to each other, and Lena took “Gladys” off her name because she said two names looked silly, and she went back to her own Sunday School.