"We've been in New York more than two years now, and why I haven't been to see you before, perhaps _you_ can tell me, for _I_ can't!" Kate Sheridan said. "But my boy is a great big fellow now; Wolf's twenty-four, and Rose is twenty-one, and this one," she nodded toward Norma, who was exchanging comments on the great storm with Leslie, "this one is nearly nineteen! And you see they're all working: Wolf's doing wonderfully with a firm of machine manufacturers, in Newark, and Rose has been with one real estate firm since we came. And Norma here works in a bookstore, up the Avenue a bit, Biretta's." "Why, I go in there nearly every week!" the old lady said. "She told me the other night that she had been selling some books to Mr. Christopher Liggett, and that's Miss Alice's husband, I hear," said Mrs. Sheridan. "She's in what they call the Old Book Room," she added, lowering her voice. "She's wonderful about books, reads them, and knows them as if they were children--they think the world of her in there! And I keep house for the three of them, and what with this and that--I never have any time!" "But you have someone to help you, Kate?" the old lady asked, with her amused and affectionate eyes on the other's wholesome face. "Why would I?" demanded Mrs. Sheridan, roundly. "The girls are a great help----" "She always assumes a terrific brogue the minute you ask her why we don't have someone in to help her," Norma contributed, with a sort of shy and loving audacity. "She'll tell you in a minute that faith, she and her sister used to run barefoot over the primroses, and they blooming beyond anything the Lord ever created, and the spring on them----" Leslie Melrose laughed out suddenly, in delighted appreciation, and the tension between the two girls was over. They had not quite known how to talk to each other; Norma naturally assuming that Leslie looked down upon a seller of books, and anxious to show her that she was unconscious of either envy or inferiority, and Leslie at a loss because her usual social chatter was as foreign here as a strange tongue would be. But no type is quicker to grasp upon amusement, and to appreciate the amuser, than Leslie's, unable to amuse itself, and skilled in seeking for entertainment. She was too shy to ask Norma to imitate her aunt again, but her stiffness relaxed, and she asked Norma if it was not great "fun" to sell things--especially at Christmas, for instance. Norma asked in turn if Mr. Liggett was not Leslie's uncle, and said that she had sold him hundreds of beautiful books for his wife, and had even had a note from Leslie's Aunt Alice, thanking her for some little courtesy. "But isn't that funny!" Leslie said, with her childish widening of the eyes. "That you should know Chris!"