to it
with Helene Von Eaton, who already at twenty was beginning to be just
a little bit bored with parties; and together through all that riot of
music and flowers and rainbow colors and dazzling lights they trotted
and tangoed with monotonous perfection--the envied and admired of all
beholders; two superbly physical young specimens of manhood and
womanhood, desperately condoning each other's dullnesses for the sake
of each other's good looks.

And while Youth and its Laughter--a chaos of color and shrill
crescendos--was surging back and forth across the flower-wreathed
piazzas, and violins were wheedling, and Japanese lanterns drunk with
candle light were bobbing gaily in the balsam-scented breeze, little
Eve Edgarton, up-stairs in her own room, was kneeling crampishly on
the floor by the open window, with her chin on the window-sill,
staring quizzically down--down--down on all that joy and novelty, till
her father called her a trifle impatiently at last from his microscope
table on the other side of the room.

"Eve!" summoned her father. "What an idler you are! Can't you see how
worried I am over this specimen here? My eyes, I tell you, aren't what
they used to be."

Then, patiently, little Eve Edgarton scrambled to her feet and,
crossing over to her father's table, pushed his head mechanically
aside and, bending down, squinted her own eye close to his magnifying
glass.

"Bell-shaped calyx?" she began. "Five petals of the corollary partly
united? Why, it must be some relation to the Mexican rain-tree," she
mumbled without enthusiasm. "Leaves--alternate, bi-pinnate, very
typically--few foliate," she continued. "Why, it's a--a
Pithecolobium."

"Sure enough," said Edgarton. "That's what I thought all the time."

As one eminently relieved of all future worry in the matter, he jumped
up, pushed away his microscopic work, and, grabbing up the biggest
book on the table, bolted unceremoniously for an easy chair.

Indifferently for a moment little Eve Edgarton stood watching him.
Then heavily, like a sleepy, insistent puppy dog, she shambled across
the room and, climbing up into her father's lap, shoved aside her
father's book, and burrowed her head triumphantly back into the lean,
bony curve of his shoulder, her whole yawning interest centered
apparently in the toes of her father's slippers.

Then so quietly that it scarcely seemed abrupt, "Father," she asked,
"was my mother--beautiful?"

"What?" gasped Edgarto