They sat in their tremendously varnished and steam-heated room on the second floor of daughter Lulu's house, and found some occupation in being gloomy. For ten days now they had been her guests. Lulu had received them with bright excitement and announced that they needn't ever do any more work, and were ever so welcome--and then she had started to reform them. It may seem a mystery as to why a woman whose soul was composed of vinegar and chicken feathers, as was Lulu Appleby Hartwig's, should have wanted her parents to stay with her. Perhaps she liked them. One does find such anomalies. Anyway, she condescendingly bought them new hats. And her husband, a large, heavy-blooded man, made lumbering jokes at their expense, and expected them to laugh. "The old boy still likes to play the mouth-organ--nothing like these old codgers for thinking they're still kids," Mr. Hartwig puffed at dinner, then banged his fist and laughed rollingly. He seemed surprised when Father merely flushed and tightened his tie. For all his gross body, Mr. Hartwig was sensitive--so sensitive that he was hurt when people didn't see the humor of his little sallies. The Hartwigs' modest residence was the last word in cement and small useless side-tables and all modern inconveniences. The furnace heat made you sneeze, and the chairs, which were large and tufted, creaked. In the dining-room was an electrolier made of seven kinds of inimical colored glass, and a plate-rack from which were hung department-store steins. On the parlor table was a kodak album with views of Harry in every stage of absurdity. There was a small car which Mr. Hartwig drove himself. And there was a bright, easy, incredibly dull social life; neighbors who went out to the country club to watch the tennis in summer, and played "five hundred" every Saturday evening in the winter. Like a vast proportion of the inhabitants of that lonely city, New York, the Applebys were unused to society. It is hard to tell which afflicted them more--sitting all day in their immaculate plastered and varnished room with nothing useful to do or being dragged into the midst of chattering neighbors who treated them respectfully, as though they were old. Mother begged daughter to be permitted to dust or make beds; Father suggested that he might rake the lawn. But Lulu waggled her stringy forefinger at them and bubbled, "No, no! What would the neighbors think? Don't you suppose that we can afford to have you dear old people take a rest? Why, Harris would be awfully angry if he saw you out puttering around, Father. No, you just sit and have a good rest." And then, when they had composed to a spurious sort of rest the hands that were aching for activity, the Applebys would be dragged out, taken to teas, shown off, with their well-set-up backs and handsome heads, as Lulu's aristocratic parents. "My father has been a prominent business man in New York for many years, you know," she would confide to neighbors.