Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III. textit{THE WELFORDS? PARTY. textit{" She cheered each dry committee With talcs of absent folk; And let nor truth nor pity Impair her little joke; Till loves were soiled and lives were spoiled By every word she spoke." IT is proverbial that the ruling power of a house is generally vested in the worst temper therein; therefore Julia Welford had her way, and the Morgans were invited to what was called in Sunnydale " a friendly evening," instead of being treated to a dinner. " A friendly evening " began in coffee and closed in a cold supper, and was an enjoyable form of entertainment to all such as were old enough and wise enough not to sigh for a textit{tite- and -tete. For this it offered little or no opportunity, and so was inferior— in the eyes of the young and foolish—to a dance, a dinnerparty, and most emphatically to a picnic. Julia was right in her surmise that Ethel Harland would not have what girls call " a proper evening dress "; instead of displaying the regulation arms and neck, she wore a gown of some clinging white material, up to her throat and down to her wrists; but her beauty was so striking that she looked lovely even in this most simple attire. At least, so Percy Welford thought. One of the peculiarities of the Welfords' "friendly evenings" was that the number of the guests and the number of the drawing-room chairs were identical, so that nobody could change his or her position unless somebody else were seized with a simultaneous desire. This, like the old custom of taking wine with people, depended too much upon the whim of another to be absolutely satisfactory to any one. It requires much self-confidence, added to considerable textit{savoir faire, to enable one to break away from one's anchorage in a crowded drawing-room until there is another haven in sig...