Good-looking chap, ain't he?"

"SHE'S a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with prompt
irreverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which
gathered between Lapham's eyes, "What a beautiful creature
she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too."

"She is good," said the father, relenting.

"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman,"
said the potential reprobate. "If my wife wasn't good
enough to keep both of us straight, I don't know what
would become of me." "My other daughter," said Lapham,
indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face
of singular gravity. "Mis' Lapham," he continued,
touching his wife's effigy with his little finger.
"My brother Willard and his family--farm at Kankakee.
Hazard Lapham and his wife--Baptist preacher in Kansas.
Jim and his three girls--milling business at Minneapolis.
Ben and his family--practising medicine in Fort Wayne."

The figures were clustered in an irregular group
in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness
had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham's
own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza.
The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact
that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible people,
with a very fair share of beauty among the young girls;
some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put
them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course;