“Oh, Glen! I’m right sorry, but I can’t come! I have to go visiting with my Auntie Lou-May!” At four o’clock one guest was among those present, Janice Jennings, a Northern child sojourning at the Bella Vista with a gay grandmother while her parents were being divorced. “Grammer said I could come for a while but I can’t eat any refreshments,” she announced with sincere regret. “My stummick is upset. She sent for your popper and he said I dassent eat any sweet stuff for a week. Lookit!” She produced, as evidence, an unpleasant tongue. Pert, sharp with the brittle wisdom of a hotel child, she inspected games and food and favors, contrasting them frankly with more opulent affairs in her native Pittsburg, and when it seemed certain that no one else was coming she retrieved her hat and wrap. “No fun playing games with just us two,” she said, candidly, “and as long as I can’t eat I’d rather sit on the hotel porch and listen to the ladies talking. They tell about who’s trying to get married, and who’s getting divorced, like my mother and father, and _about babies coming_, and if I keep awful still they don’t tell me to run away and play like a good girl.” On departure, shaking hands primly and assuring them that she’d had a perfectly lovely time, shrill mirth laid hold on her. “Oh, golly,” she giggled, “you know what it makes me think of? ‘_Smarty had a party, And nobody came, And Smarty ate all the jelly-cake And nearly died with the stummick ache!_’ Of course, it’s really ‘belly,’ to rhyme with ‘jelly,’” she explained engagingly, “but my grammer makes me say ‘stummick’.” Directly she was out of sight, Effie Darrow had hysterics, entirely against her better judgment, for she well know that Emma-_leen_ would gleefully carry the tale to other kitchens, but she was beyond caring for the moment. Glenwood Darrow, walking in on the scene, became the target of her revilings. “If you’d settled in a decent neighborhood! If we had a decent house! If you tried--even _tried_--to get decent people for patients!” The reproaches came forth in little yelps of woe. “If you ever did _anything_--not for _me_--I expect nothing, but for your poor _child_----” The doctor picked her up roughly but capably, carried her upstairs and put her to bed with a sleeping potion, and took his red-eyed, hot-cheeked daughter for a ten-mile drive into the hills. That trip, and her father’s words to her, stayed always in her memory beside her mother’s tragic festivity.