traveled. There was marketing to do, and sewing continually on hand,
and house-cleaning at stated intervals. In Helen Somers's old home the
daily routine had been as inflexible as its ancestor's original
Calvinistic creed--Monday, washing; Tuesday, ironing; Wednesday,
cleaning the silver; Thursday, at home to visitors; Friday, sweeping;
Saturday, baking; and Sunday, the hardest day of all. For, withal, the
Puritan sense of observance, that had not been utterly swamped by the
blue and enticing skies of California, Sunday was a feast day, not in
a lightsome sense, but in a dull, heavy, gastronomic way, unleavened
by either wine or passable wit. On Sunday the men of the family
returned home from church and gorged. If the day were fine, perhaps
everybody save mother took a cable-car ride, or a walk, or something
equally exciting. The sparkle of environment had won these people away
from tombstone reading and family prayers as a Sabbath diversion, but
even California could not be expected to make over a bluestocking in
an eye's twinkling. Mother, of course, stayed home on Sunday to "pick
up" and get ready for supper in the absence of the servant girl. A
later generation had the grace to elevate these slatternly drudges to
the title of maid, but a sterner ancestry found it expedient to be
more practical and less pretentious in its terms. On these drab
Sundays Helen Somers had passionately envied the children of foreign
breed, who seemed less hedged about by sabbatical restrictions. Not
that she wished her family to _be_ of the questionable sort that went
to El Campo or Shell Mound Park for Sunday picnics and returned in
quarrelsome state at a late hour smelling of bad whisky and worse gin.
Nor did she aspire to have sprung from the Teutonic stock that
perpetrated more respectable but equally noisy outings in the vicinity
of Woodward's Gardens. But she had a furtive and sly desire to float
oil-like upon the surface of this turbid sea, touching it at certain
points, yet scarcely mixing with it. Indeed, this inclination to taste