After we had made a slinking exit that took us into the outer room, and the girl, at a nod from Signor Paggi, had put our names down in the book and given us slips upon which were our names and lesson hours, we started down stairs and no one said a word. I think we would have kept quiet for a long, long time if I hadn’t started laughing, but I did--very suddenly and without really knowing that I wanted to--and Viola, after a moment, joined me in a weak, close-to-hysterical way. Leslie didn’t laugh and her eyes were hard and her chin set, and she was so angry that she walked as if she had been wound up too tightly. She made me think of “Mr. Wog,” a mechanical toy man, that the twins start into the living room from the dining room door sometimes when Roberta has company. It makes her very angry, because she says it looks _so_ silly, and she says that it naturally embarrasses a man to realize that some one has been listening to _every_ word he said. The twins told me that they wait around in the dark under the dining room table until they hear the caller tell Roberta that she is so sympathetic, or beautiful, or that they have _long_ admired her, and then they crawl out with their wound toy and start it in. Louise, who is the elder by two minutes, said that “Mr. Wog” almost always broke into Roberta’s soft, “Oh, _do_ you think so?” and that they always had to stuff their handkerchiefs right into their mouths to keep from screaming with giggles. But to get on, Leslie walked as Mr. Wog walks, and when she spoke she did so between sharply indrawn breaths and in a way that told a lot she didn’t trouble to put into words. “Aunt Sheila _knew_ this old _devil_--” she said, “I make _no_ apologies for calling him that--and what she did was _vicious_, positively _vicious_! She--she said I wouldn’t stick, _made_ me say I _would_, in fact--” (she paused, and had to draw several quieting breaths before she could go on) “in fact I wagered her a cottage that father gave me last birthday, a _heavenly_ sweet place up on Lake Placid, I wagered her _that_, that I would stick it out and study with this horrible person! . . . And if I can ever punish Ben Forbes for all this, I will consider that life has given me--_all the sweetness I shall ever crave_!” Then we stepped out into the street.