Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on: "Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick houses, it's all up with them--they are old married folks, and the next step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies in the society of this town." After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of the same kind of mud. "That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work and sent the washing out for a year or more."