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By Root 3387 0

who was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give publicity to the newspapers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two part-time physicians in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to arrest — or at least to jaw at — all public spitters; to leap into a Ford and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epidemics from Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined) their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even halt the business activities of Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected diphtheria.

“I get it,” said Leora, as they dressed for dinner at Pickerbaugh’s. “Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the rest of the time you’re perfectly welcome to spend in research, unless somebody interrupts you.”

IV

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old–Fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along the ridge pole. Over the front gate was the name: UNEEDAREST.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk all at once.

Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home Nest:

“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their lives — practically — and though Mother does have her sick-headaches, that’s to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while her father, the old deacon — and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our present prosperity — BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I’ve always thought —”

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My Jewels — I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses, don’t you?— but that’s what they really are to their mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished — Of course when we’d started giving them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase — it IS Chrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the girls are getting quite famous — their pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’ Baseball Team all our own — only the Doctor has to play on it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y.W.C.A. or the Camp Fire Girls; they