e to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and
stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as
though they had been pursuing each other on foot instead of verbally.

The older habitues of the house were no more peaceable and were
equally given to what seemed to childish listeners endless disputes
about matters of no importance. Professor La Rue's white mustache and
pointed beard quivered with the intensity of his scorn for the modern
school of poetry, and Madame La Rue, who might be supposed to be
insulated by the vast bulk of her rosy flesh from the currents of
passionate conviction flashing through the Marshall house, had fixed
ideas on the Franco-Prussian War, on the relative values of American
and French bed-making, and the correct method of bringing up girls
(she was childless), which needed only to be remotely stirred to burst
into showers of fiery sparks. And old Professor Kennedy was nothing
less than abusive when started on an altercation about one of the
topics vital to him, such as the ignoble idiocy of the leisure-class
ideal, or the generally contemptible nature of modern society. No, it
was not mere difference of opinion which so charged the air during
Aunt Victoria's rare visits with menacing electricity.

As a matter of fact, if she did differ in opinion from her brother and
his wife, the children would never have been able to guess it from the
invariably restrained tones of her fluent and agreeable speech, so
different from the outspoken virulence with which people in that house
were accustomed to defend their ideas. But, indefinable though it was
to Sylvia's undeveloped powers of analysis, she felt that the advent
of her father's beautiful and gracious sister was like a drop of
transparent but bitter medicine in a glass of clear water. There
was no outward sign of change, but everything was tinctured by
it. Especially was her father changed from his usual brilliantly
effervescent self. In answer to the most harmless remark of Aunt
Victoria, he might reply with a sudden grim sneering note in his voice
which made Sylvia look up at him half-afraid. If Aunt Victoria noticed
this sardonic accent, she never paid it the tribute of a break in the
smooth surface of her own consistent good-will, rebuking her brother's
prickly hostility only by the most indulgent tolerance of his
queer ways, a tolerance which never had on Professor Marshall's
sensibilities the soothing effect which