Her friends were acutely interested in her progress, and showed it in practical ways. The New Woman's Club furnished five families of patrons for the regular service of cooked food, which soon grew, with satisfaction, to a dozen or so, varying from time to time. The many families with invalids, and lonely invalids without families, were glad to avail themselves of the special delicacies furnished at Union House. Picnickers found it easier to buy Diantha's marvelous sandwiches than to spend golden morning hours in putting up inferior ones at home; and many who cooked for themselves, or kept servants, were glad to profit by this outside source on Sunday evenings and “days out.” There was opposition too; both the natural resistance of inertia and prejudice, and the active malignity of Mrs. Thaddler. The Pornes were sympathetic and anxious. “That place'll cost her all of $10,000 a year, with those twenty-five to feed, and they only pay $4.50 a week--I know that!” said Mr. Porne. “It does look impossible,” his wife agreed, “but such is my faith in Diantha Bell I'd back her against Rockefeller!” Mrs. Weatherstone was not alarmed at all. “If she _should_ fail--which I don't for a moment expect--it wont ruin me,” she told Isabel. “And if she succeeds, as I firmly believe she will, why, I'd be willing to risk almost anything to prove Mrs. Thaddler in the wrong.” Mrs. Thaddler was making herself rather disagreeable. She used what power she had to cry down the undertaking, and was so actively malevolent that her husband was moved to covert opposition. He never argued with his wife--she was easily ahead of him in that art, and, if it came to recriminations, had certain controvertible charges to make against him, which mode him angrily silent. He was convinced in a dim way that her ruthless domineering spirit, and the sheer malice she often showed, were more evil things than his own bad habits; and that even in their domestic relation her behavior really caused him more pain and discomfort than he caused her; but he could not convince her of it, naturally. “That Diantha Bell is a fine girl,” he said to himself. “A damn fine girl, and as straight as a string!” There had crept out, through the quenchless leak of servants talk, a varicolored version of the incident of Mathew and the transom; and the town had grown so warm for that young gentleman that he had gone to Alaska suddenly, to cool off, as it were. His Grandmother, finding Mrs. Thaddler invincible with this new weapon, and what she had so long regarded as her home now visibly Mrs. Weatherstone's, had retired in regal dignity to her old Philadelphia establishment, where she upheld the standard of decorum against the weakening habits of a deteriorated world, for many years. As Mr. Thaddler thought of this sweeping victory, he chuckled for the hundredth time. “She ought to make good, and she will. Something's got to be done about it,” said he.