"I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, if you got rich relations it's a help."
"How grand my brother has done for himself, Mrs. Lissman! Such a house he has built on Kingston Place! Such a home! You can see for yourself, Mrs. Lissman, how his wife and daughters drive up sometimes in their automobile."
"I'm surprised they don't come more often, Mrs. Shongut; your Renie and them girls, I guess, are grand friends."
"Ya; and to be in that banking-house is a grand start for my boy. I always say it can lead to almost anything. Only I tell him he shouldn't let fine company make him wild."
"Ach, boys will be boys, Mrs. Shongut. Even now it ain't so easy for me to get make my Roscoe to come in off his roller-skates at night. My Jeannie I can make mind; but I tell her when she is old enough to have beaus, then our troubles begin with her."
Mrs. Shongut's voice dropped into her throat in the guise of a whisper. "Some time, Mrs. Lissman, when my Renie ain't home, I want you should come over and I read you some of the letters that girl gets from young men. So mad she always gets at me if she knows I talk about them."
"Mrs. Shongut, you'll laugh when I tell you; but already in the school my Jeannie gets little notes what the little boys write to her. Mad it makes me like anything; but what can you do when you got a pretty girl?"
"A young man in Peoria, Mrs. Lissman, such beautiful letters he writes Renie, never in my life did I read. Such language, Mrs. Lissman; just like out of a song-book! Not a time my Renie goes out that I don't go right to her desk to read 'em--that's how beautiful he writes. In Green Springs she met him."
"Ain't it a pleasure, Mrs. Shongut, to have grand letters like that? Even with my little Jeannie, though it makes me so mad, still I--"
"But do you think my Renie will have any of them? 'Not,' she says, 'if they was lined in gold.'"
"I guess she got plenty beaus. Say, I ain't so blind that I don't see Sollie Spitz on your porch every--"
"Sollie Spitz! Ach, Mrs. Lissman, believe me, there's nothing to that! My Renie since a little child likes reading and writing like he does. I tell her papa we made a mistake not to keep her in school like she wanted."
"She loves learning, that girl. Under her pillow yesterday I found a book of verses about flowers. Where she gets such a mind, Mrs. Lissman, I don't know. But Sollie Spitz! Say, we don't want no poets in the family."