colored paste, sugar-sprinkled,
dear to her childish heart but loathed by a maturer palate, rose to her
mind. There had been another haunting recollection: for months she
had been unable to define it perfectly, though it had always brought a
thrill of disgust with its vague appeal. One day she caught it and told
them.

"It was that dreadful creature Mr. Barnum exhibited," she declared,
"that we didn't allow the children to go to see--Jo-jo, the Dog-faced
Boy! You remember?"

Their cold horror, briefly expressed, had shown her that she had
trespassed too far on their indulgence, and she spoke of it no more, but
the memory rankled.

"It's so strange you don't see how cunning it is," Carolyn complained;
"everybody does it now. The whole Chatworth family have those names,
Aunt Ju, and it is the dearest thing to hear the old doctor call Captain
Arthur 'Ga-ga.' You know that dignified sister with the lovely silvery
hair? Well, they all call her 'Looty.' And nobody thinks of Hunter
Chatworth's real name--he's always 'Toto.'"

"And he has three children!"

Miss Trueman sighed; the constitution of the modern family amazed her
endlessly. Ga-ga, indeed!

"Do the children call him Toto, too?" she demanded, with an attempt at
sarcasm, a conversational form to which she was by nature a stranger.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Carolyn answered carelessly. "I suppose
not. Though plenty of children do, you know. Mrs. Ranger's little girl
always calls her mother Lou."

"Mrs. Ranger--you mean the woman that smokes?"

Miss Trueman's tone brought vividly to the mind a person dangling from
disgusted finger-tips a mouse or beetle.

"For heaven's sake, Aunt Jule"--in moments of intense exasperation they
reverted unconsciously to the old form--"don't speak of her as if she
smoked for a living!"

"I should rather not speak of her at all," said Miss Trueman severely.

They raised their eyebrows helplessly: Carolyn's irritation was so
unfeigned that she omitted a justly famous shrug.

For two years they had devoted an appreciable part of their busy hours
to modifying Aunt Julia's antique prejudices, developing in her the
latent aesthetic sense that their Wednesday art class taught them
existed in every one, cajoling her into a tolerance of certain phases
of modern literature considered seriously and weekly by the Monday
Afternoon Club, and incidentally utilizing her as a chaperon and
housekeeper in their modest up-town apartment.