Hattie hugged her mother hard and squealed: “Why, Momma, you’re looking fine!” Momma was doleful enough to remember her own woes, and she groaned: “You just say that! I don’t feel a bit good and I’m a sight! Don’t show me to any of your swell Terra Hut friends, for I’ll disgrace you.” Hattie had hard sledding before her. Her mother did not even want to cheer up. She wanted to be sick, and she doubled her misery by bewailing the fact that she couldn’t throw off her gloom. She tried to smile once or twice, but Hattie begged her not to. Since Momma would neither go calling nor receive callers, she was not easy to entertain. She was ashamed of her shabby clothes and her dowdy appearance, and so was Hattie. Hattie would not admit it, though she did say that Poppa, with all his money, ought to dress her up better. Poor Poppa had tried to. The average American husband does not often get the chance to complain of his wife’s thrift in clothes, but Mr. Lundy, little as he noticed such things, had finally urged Momma to spend a little more money on duds now that the children were buying their own. But his well-meant hints had only depressed her the more, and she had retorted that he was sick and tired of her and her old face. He had dropped the subject. Hattie had no better success. All that she succeeded in accomplishing was a round of the Terre Haute physicians--especially of those frightful personages known as “specialists.” Each of these found his specialty in Momma, and went after it. One of them got away with a large number of her teeth before she could fight him off. Others offered to remove various parts of her, but she declined to be separated from any more of her fixtures. She reduced Hattie’s general practitioner almost to nervous prostration, and at last, in order to get her off his hands and off her daughter’s nerves, he casually recommended a New York specialist, Dr. Courtneidge, who had the monopoly on a very abstruse operation dealing with the pancreas or something that Momma didn’t even know she had. She was quite overawed at finding herself the proud possessor of such a thing. She felt like an old watch that has suddenly learned it has had jewelled movements all these years. But after a few hours of being interested in herself she slumped again and said she guessed she’d take her old pancreas back to Carthage with her. She’d got along with it so far, and, seeing as she’d denied herself a trip to New York all her life for fun, she certainly wa’nt going all that ways to let a doctor poke a knife into her. Hattie fumed and bullied in vain for a day or two, then she fired off a telegram to Poppa to come over at once. * * * * *