Soon the company began to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking it a virtue to stifle every ambition, smother every craving for pleasure. When they felt tired, they called it laziness and felt disgraced, and thus they had spent their days, working, working from the gray dawn, until the darkness came again, and all for what? When in after years these girls, broken in health and in spirits, slipped away to premature graves, or, worse still, settled into chronic invalidism, of what avail was the memory of the cows they milked, the mats they hooked, the number of pounds of butter they made. Not all the girls were like these. Maud Murray was there. Maud Murray with the milkmaid cheeks and curly black hair, the typical country girl of bounding life aid spirits, the type so often seen upon the stage and so seldom elsewhere. Mrs. Motherwell had warned Tom against Maud Murray as well as Nellie Slater. She had once seen Maud churning, and she had had a newspaper pinned to the wall in front of her, and was reading it as she worked, and Mrs. Motherwell knew that a girl who would do that would come to no good. Martha Perkins was the one girl of whom Mrs. Motherwell approved. Martha's record on butter and quilts and mats stood high. Martha was a nice quiet girl. Mrs. Motherwell often said a "nice, quiet, unappearing girl." Martha certainly was quiet. Her conversational attainments did not run high. "Things is what they are, and what's the good of saying anything," Martha had once said in defence of her silent ways. She was small and sallow-skinned and was dressed in an anaemic gray; her thin hay-coloured hair was combed straight back from a rather fine forehead. She stooped a little when she walked, and even when not employed her hands picked nervously at each other. Martha's shyness, the "unappearing" quality, was another of her virtues in the eyes of Tom's mother. Martha rarely left home even to go to Millford. Martha did not go to the Agricultural Fair when her mats and quilts and butter and darning and buttonholes on cotton got their red tickets. Martha stayed at home and dug potatoes--a nice, quiet, unappearing girl. When they played games at the Slaters that evening, Martha would not play. She never cared for games she said, they tired a person so. She would just watch the others, and she wished again that she had her knitting. Then the kitchen floor was cleared; table, chairs and lounge were set outside to make room for the dancing, and when the violins rang out with the "Arkansaw Traveller," and big John Kennedy in his official voice of caller-off announced, "Select your partners," every person felt that the real business of the evening had begun.