“But, Aunt Fan, I didn’t expect you to come.” Ginger was wholly frank about it. “My dear girl, I don’t suppose you want me any more than I want to come and listen to the crickets with their mufflers open all night, but--I ask you--can you entertain a strange young man, _Boston_, too, isn’t he?--alone?” “I don’t see why not,” said her niece, coolly. “He isn’t strange at all; he was Aleck’s friend.” “Well, it doesn’t matter whether you see or not,” said Mrs. Featherstone, crisply. “I’m coming. I suppose I’ll gain eighteen pounds as I did before. See here, will you promise not to let Ling make waffles?” Her carefully tinted face broke up suddenly into little wrinkles of smiles. “There, never mind! I love you if you do weigh a hundred and ten and eat everything!” Mrs. Featherstone weighed a hundred and sixty-nine and she ate like a canary and thought about food most of the time, and her large, comely face had a chronic expression of wistful yearning. Clergymen and lecturers and interpreters liked having her in the front row; they found her intense concentration and her blue-eyed gaze extremely helpful and inspiring, and they had no way of knowing that she was thinking raptly to herself-- “If I should go over to the Palace for lunch and have turkey hash and potatoes _au gratin_ and popovers and a cup of chocolate, and walk all the way home, _fast_, I don’t believe I’d gain an _ounce_!” She was Ginger’s father’s half sister, and she had been twice married. Her first husband had died and her second had been divorced, but she was still on very kindly and pleasant terms with him. He gave her a generous alimony and she was able to live in a smart apartment with a smart maid and wear the smartest of clothes and she wanted for nothing in the world except food.