appalling; your
language is more so. May I ask whether you are going into slumming?"

"No. Worse."

"For the family credit, I must draw the line at the Salvation Army,"
Bobby adjured her. "A poke bonnet and a tambourine wouldn't be a proper
fruitage for our family tree."

"What are you going to do, Beatrix?" Sally repeated. "It is something
uncanny, I know. I felt it in the air, and that was the reason I stayed
until everybody else had gone. I knew you wished to confess."

"But I didn't."

"Not even to ease your conscience?"

"My conscience is perfectly easy."

"But you said it was worse than slumming."

"It is. Slumming is aristocratic and conservative; I am about to be
radical."

"Don't tell me it is spectacles and statistics," Bobby pleaded. "I abhor
statistical women; they are so absorbed in collating material that they
never listen to the point of even your best stories."

"Not a statistic, I promise you, Bobby."

"Nor a poke bonnet?"

"No; my choice is for toques, not pokes. Do you know Mr. Arlt?"

"Never heard of the gentleman." Bobby's tone expressed cheery
indifference, as he bent over to prod the fire.

"But you met him, Bobby."

"It was in a crowd, then, and it doesn't signify that I've heard of him.
Who is he, Sally?"

With the freedom born of intimacy, Sally was eating up her lemon rind,
and there was a momentary pause, while she shook her head. Beatrix
answered the question.

"He is Mr. Thayer's accompanist, that little German who was with him at
Mrs. Stanley's."

"Have you heard Thayer yet, Sally?" Bobby asked parenthetically.

"No. I have heard about him till I am weary of his name, though, and
such a name! Cotton Mather Thayer!"

"Did it ever occur to you the handicap of going through life as Bobby?"
inquired the owner of that name. "It is a handicap; but it is also a
distinct advantage. Nobody ever expects me to amount to anything. No
matter how much I fizzle, they'll say 'Oh, but it's only Bobby Dane!'
Now, Cotton Mather Thayer is bound to fill a niche in the--the--"

"Lofty cathedral of fame reared by the ages." Sally helped him out of
his rhetorical abyss.

"Thanks awfully; yes. And then Beatrix will scatter her water-soaked
breadcrumbs around him to coax the little sparrows to make their nests
in the crown of his hat and get free music lessons for their young in
exchange for keeping his head warm."

Beatrix frowned; then she laughed. Bobby was incorrigible, and there