natural-born actresses? They're not afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into it—perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would just love them, and maybe they've been sent to us to elevate the drama. Upsy go."
During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.
Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. ("Of course we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.") But the unexpected feature was Orchid's cornet solo.
Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.
"I've never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and sober up," he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.
While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as gay, good, dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late eighties and the early nineties, the naïve and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang Swance River; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become a missionary or a millionaire.
For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable heartiness into his "Enjoyed that s' much." He felt victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness.
But the evening's orgy was only begun.
They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The sight of him on the floor in his wife's fur coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.
Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pat-
