tumes passing. Arnold sulked
in silence until Judith, emerging from her usual self-contained
reticence, made her first advance to him. "Let's us all go there
by the railing where we can look down into the central court," she
suggested, and having a nodded permission from their elders, the three
children walked away.

They looked down into the great marble court, far below them, now
fairy-like with carefully arranged electric lights, gleaming through
the palms. The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats
were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness
of mere ant-like comings and goings.

"Not so bad," said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased,
looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of
the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the
polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery,
the heavy gilding of the chairs.... Everything in sight exhaled an
intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a
musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk,
another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible--the unwashed smell,
floating up from the paupers' cellars which support Aladdin's palaces
of luxury.

But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid
mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very
common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious
even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all
about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might
have been leaning over a picket fence. "I wouldn't give in to Her!"
she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.

Arnold looked nettled. "Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what
she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often
you could notice it much! _Saunders_ isn't that kind! Saunders is a
gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get
going!"

It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years
before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she
remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet
peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.

Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: "But it's my belief that
Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business! Bad business!
He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to