Their father was a Traveling Man, now, for the London Furniture Company. He came home Thursday nights and stayed till Sunday night. On Thursday the children would stay awake, waiting for him. They could peek down through the register and see their mother sitting at the window, waiting. Then there would be the step on the porch, the exclamations and laughter. Their father and mother would embrace joyously and, still holding each other, start waltzing around and round the room faster and faster, their father not even stopping to take off his hat and coat. When they could stand it no longer, the children tore downstairs, barefooted, and took turns climbing up their father, ending up one on each shoulder. It was fun having your father a Traveling Man because he brought home presents. He brought hats for Mama from Cleveland, funny fans and joke books, miniature decks of cards, perfume, hair ribbons, boxes of candy, soap rabbits, pencils, calendars, and once he brought Mama a fur capelet. Another traveling man was going to sell it to him cheap if Mama liked it. Mama showed it to Aunt Lois and Grandma and Mrs. Friend, but made him take it back the next trip.

“We can’t spend that much money, dear,” she protested, fondly. “The kids all need winter coats and we need a new carpet.”

“Better keep it, Daisy,” advised Mrs. Friend. “If you don’t take it, Number Two will.”

This got to be a family joke. Their father would pass the meat platter to her and say, “If you don’t take it Number Two will.” But when he went on his long trip—the southern territory, and was gone three weeks—Mrs. Friend said, “You should have taken the fur cape because you see you didn’t get the carpet or the new coats anyway. You’ve got to take what your man has a mind to give you of his own accord, because he’s never going to give you anything you ask for, and that’s the man of it.”

“The trouble with Harry being on the road,” Mama said to Aunt Lois, “is that he makes more money than he would here in the shop, but he hardly ever sends me any.”

“Write and ask him,” urged Aunt Lois.

Mama shook her head.

“I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Harry’s feelings get so hurt when I have to tell him about money.”

“All men’s feelings are hurt there,” Aunt Lois said, laughing.

Aunt Lois’s visits, frequent though they were, were always exciting. She wore pretty clothes, furs, and kid gloves, beads, handsome combs in her fair hair, and her skin was soft and pink like the big dolls’ in the toy store. Lena was supposed to be the spit and image of her. She had beautiful teeth and was always laughing, perhaps for that very reason. One grudge she still bore against her absent husband was that he had exploited her beautiful crinkly gold hair to advertise his own manufactured hair tonic “Blair’s Blondina”; and since word came that he made quite a sum out of his formula Aunt Lois was all the madder. She always entered in a state of excitement about something, so it made her calls very thrilling. She brought presents, a bag of peanuts, a cake, some chewing gum, every time she came, but usually Mama or one of the children was in tears by the time she left, just out of excess excitement.