Belles on their Toes

looking, and then get up and leave. It's almost indecent."
    Mother shook her head and tried not to smile. "They're the limit," she agreed.
    "They invent all kinds of excuses about why they lave to leave. The lamest you ever heard—and they expect him to swallow them. Like, it's high time they taped the handle of their baseball bat. Or they'd better go check and see whether Fourteen has had kittens. Or they promised Tom they'd help him sift the ashes."
    "It's hard to be the oldest," Mother agreed.
    "If Bob and Jane don't get the hint, the others pick .them up bodily and carry them out. And then Frank and Bill mumble something about saving electricity, and go around switching out the lights. My shins are all barked up from bumping into things in the dark."
    "It just means the children like Doctor Bob," Mother said. "It's a compliment to him, really, dear."
    "But suppose," Anne groaned, "he gets the idea that all that business of turning off the lights has been going on with every boy I've ever had over here before?"
    Doctor Bob liked children and knew how to talk with them. Bob and Jane started following him around the house, and wouldn't go to bed at night unless he'd come up and tuck them in. Although we tried to keep them out of the way, they started begging to be taken along when he and Anne went out in his car in the afternoons. Bob would sit between Doctor Bob and Anne in the coupe, and Jane would sit on Anne's lap. We were horrified, but the two youngest children wouldn't listen to reason.
    "I give up," Anne told her fiancé, on one such afternoon excursion. She adjusted Jane on her lap. "Either they're in our hair, like right now, or they're tiptoeing around turning out lights."
    "I don't mind it either way," her Bob chuckled. "Except I never saw a house where they had more baseball bats to tape or more ashes... Look, Bobby," he said, pointing out his window. "See the choo-choo train?"
    "Where?" said Bob, leaning across him. "Where, Doctor Bob?"
    "We just passed it. Look out the back window, and you'll see it."
    Bob stood up on the seat and then, so he could get a better view, stood on Doctor Bob's thigh. "Choo, choo, choo," he said. "Big son of a gun, isn't it, Doctor Bob?"
    "It sure is. One of the biggest."
    "At one time," said Anne, "I was silly enough to think that by the time I was engaged I might occasionally ride in an automobile without holding children in my lap. I used to have dreams, when I was a little girl, of sitting up front and having a whole half-seat, all to myself. I used to dream... Look, Janey, see the horsey?"
    "Where, Anne? I don't see the horsey?"
    "We just passed it," said Anne, holding her up so she could look out the back window.
    Doctor Bob reached over and squeezed Anne's hand. Her diamond solitaire picked up a piece of the sun and sparkled.

    They were married in September of the following year, after Anne had received her diploma. The wedding was at our house. At Anne's insistence, Mother herself gave the bride away.
    The minister of our church in Montclair, who was to officiate at most of our weddings and a dozen or so christenings of Mother's grandchildren, performed the ceremony.
    The minister had children of his own, and a good deal of poise. He wasn't upset when Lillian and Fred blundered into the room that had been assigned to him, while he was slipping into his vestments. And he chuckled, along with everyone else, when young Bob jumped onto Anne's train and brought the wedding procession to a faltering halt.
    It was a happy wedding, but we felt sorry for Mother. We thought we knew what was running through her mind. Anne was the first to leave the fold. Ernestine and Martha would probably be next. How would Mother get along with a family of only eight children? How would she feel when all of the children, even Jane, had married and left home?
    Poor Mother, we thought. Poor, poor Mother.
    Tom watched the ceremony from the back of the crowd, occasionally producing a none-too-clean handkerchief to dab at his eyes. When it was over, he pushed his way up to Anne, fished in his pocket, and handed her twenty crumpled one-dollar bills.
    "If he ain't good to you," he said, "I want you to buy a ticket and come home."
    Anne looked for a minute as if she might lean over and kiss him, but Tom went into his fighter's crouch, weaving and making fierce faces.
    "If he don't behave hisself," said Tom, "let him have the left like I learned you, and follow it with the right, like this."
    He