"Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, "how you talk! I'm sure father isn't an uncertainty, and there wasn't anything uncertain about grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they're just about as certain as we are." The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless industry. "It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering. "Well, it isn't hard for me to know _this_ time," said Mrs. Weaver, her features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose chase." Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back, and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread. "I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to nag them about. I'm sure I"--She slammed the door upon her voice, which seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation. Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman refused to meet her gaze. "I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously. Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it. "Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said apologetically. "To think of them poor things trying to keep house--and the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma." Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity. "I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!" She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it. "I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to know your dooty at a glance." Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to such lax uncertainty. "The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night, "you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."