It had evidently been a sore point with Nora--and, if the truth were told, with John, who had an orderly mind. Although he adored his flyaway, irresponsible mother, it was in spite of her ways and not because of them. "Do you think you are apt to get excited and step on the bell?" he asked Joy. She shook her head. "I like things the way they're planned," she confessed. "They go along more easily." "I suppose," he meditated aloud, "you might even put a man's collars in the same place twice running." "Where else?" demanded Joy, who was so thoughtful of such things that she was even intrusted with certain duties of the sort for Grandfather. "Well, Mother hasn't repeated herself for twenty-eight years," said John a little wistfully. "She says she doesn't intend to get in a rut, nor let me." Joy laughed aloud. "It must take lots of spare time, hunting new spots!" she said. "I'm afraid I'd think life was too short to take all that trouble." "I'm coming to the conclusion that there's nothing you can't do," he said irrelevantly. "But I suppose you had a very able godmother--princesses do, don't they?" "I have a wishing ring," Joy explained, entering into the play. "It's very well trained. All I have to do is to tell it things, and it sees to them immediately." John went on eating his soup. "You look as if you wanted to ask it to do something," she pursued. He looked thoughtful. "As a matter of fact, I do; but it seems an unfair advantage to take not only of a docile wishing ring, but of you," he stated. "Try us and see," invited Joy, ringing, with a visible satisfaction in things, for the next course. So John took courage. "It's socks," he confessed with a boyish shame-facedness. "I--I'd like to see how you'd look doing them. I can't quite make myself see you, even now.... I suppose I'm silly--I'd like to see you sitting under the light in there, sewing for me, just once." "You mean mending, not sewing," Joy told him cheerfully. However the wishing ring may have felt about the request, the princess was frankly delighted, "Have you got many? I do them very fast!" John still looked doubtful. He still seemed to feel that it was a mean advantage to take of the most domesticated ring and princess. "You see," he explained, "Mother's idea is--and it's likely a very good one--that when socks have holes you throw 'em away and get more. She doesn't make allowance, though, for one's getting attached to a pair. And I bought six pairs lately that I liked awfully well, and I hated to see them die.... They're just little holes." "I'll get them and do them as soon as we're through dinner," she promised. "Won't your mother mind?" "She'll be delighted," John promised sincerely. "But she hasn't them. I have." Accordingly, after dinner Joy demanded them, and John produced them, while she got out her mending-basket, something he had never suspected her of possessing, he told her.