drown his sorrows some
way."

Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or
impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly
knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the
significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold
surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man
of the world patting two pretty children on the head.

Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she
had begun it. "But you _did_ give in to her! You pretend you didn't
because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let
_any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!"

Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward
overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature
yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand. He shifted his feet and
said defensively: "Aw, she's a woman. A fellow can't knock her down. I
wouldn't let a man do it." He retreated still further, through another
phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory: "I'd like
to know who _you_ are to talk! You give in to _your_ mother all the
time!"

"I don't give in to my mother; I _mind_ her," said Judith, drawing a
distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute
enough to attack other than by a jeering, "Oh, what a crawl! What's
the diff?"

"And I mind her whether she's there or not! _I_ do!" continued Judith,
pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her
advantage.

Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so
red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of
luxury resounding about them. "Hush! hush!" she said; "don't be so
silly. We ought to be going back."

Arnold took her rebuke without protest. Either something in this
passage-at-arms had perversely brought a sudden impulse to his mind,
or he had all along a purpose in his fantastic trip West. As they
reached the two ladies, he burst out, "Say, Madrina, why couldn't I go
on to La Chance and go to school there, and live with the Marshalls?"

Four amazed faces were turned on him. His stepmother evidently thought
him stricken with sudden insanity and strove distractedly to select,
from the heaped pile of her reasons for so thinking, some few which
might be cited without too great offense to her brother's mode of
life: "Why, what a strange idea, Arnold! What eve