Stebbins was not on speaking terms. Mrs. Robbins, it seemed, had employed the squeaky voice so familiar at masquerade parties and had thus rendered her disguise complete. Upon her testimony it was learned that Mr. Stebbins's voice had been so roughened by drink that his own mother wouldn't have recognized it. Mr. Stebbins had withdrawn from the party and, at the end of the academic year, from the college as well, and his name is now only an appalling memory. In the morning Nancy hurried up to the Norrises' as soon as she could. She found Mary and her mother in the drawing-room. Mary was playing the piano while her mother sat in a distant chair, amiably shredding codfish, a pleasure which she would on no account yield to the kitchen. As soon as the rush of sisterly greeting was passed, all four--for the cod could not be left behind--repaired to the sofa in the library; and after the gaps in their correspondence had been filled, they came to the party. Mary was to be one of the charade captains and Tom Reynolds the other. Nancy, who was an inevitable member of the charade, was to be on Tom's side. "Tell me," she asked, "is he really as nice as you people make out?" "Oh yes," replied Mary, "he's one of us." "He used to scare me. He never would dance with me any more than he had to, and I always was afraid he would get that terribly bored look I've seen him get. I think probably he's conceited." "Oh dear, to hear you girls talk you'd think that a little honest boredom was the most dreadful thing on earth. Why, your fathers used to get so bored with us that----" "Now, Gumgum, you know that isn't sensible," broke in Mary severely--a regrettable habit which seems increasingly prevalent among our modern daughters--"unless you people were ninnies." "That was in Garfield's administration," replied Mrs. Norris absently, "or possibly a little before, in Hayes's--Rutherford B. Hayes. He did away with the carpetbaggers and all those dreadful people in the South." Then, more dreamily still, "His middle name was Birchard." "I know why you think he's conceited," Mary went on, warming up to the never-ending pleasure of analysis, "but it's because he's really diffident. Lots of people I know who people think are snobby are only just diffident." "What on earth do you mean by saying that Rutherford Hayes was diffident? He wasn't a bit. He was a very great philanthropist." "She's too awful today," exclaimed Mary, "with that smelly old fish and Rutherford Garfield. Gracious, I'd like to bury the old thing." "You horrid, ungrateful child, when I'm doing this for your lunch. We're just old Its, we mothers. I'm going to start an Emancipation Club for Mothers. The poor old things, they might just as well crawl away into the bushes like rabbits."