“She began in that innocent way of hers. She thought a little knowledge of music would be good for me. I said yes to that. Yes, she went on, it would be quite proper for me to learn to play some of the simpler hymns. When she said ‘hymns’----” She sat quite askew and laughed, and when Baron made no response at all she became uneasy. “You know you’ve got to protect yourself,” she insisted defiantly. “Very well; and then what?” “I told her it was so good of her to be willing to teach me, but that--well, I told her hymns wouldn’t do.” “Why wouldn’t they do? They’re music.” “It’s like I told her. Hymns are all well enough for persons who don’t understand very well--like raised letters for the blind. But when Mrs. Shepard lets me set the table, how would it sound if I kept saying: ‘I’m helping Mrs. Shepard! I’m helping Mrs. Shepard!’ She might be too polite to say anything, but she’d be thinking: ‘The gabby little thing, why don’t she just do it and let it go at that?’ On the other hand, if I just did the best I could without making out that I was the whole show, she’d be apt to say: ‘Bless her heart, she’s really helping.’ I think singing hymns is about the same thing. It’s as if you kept saying: ‘I’m praising God! I’m praising God!’ It would be--oh, bad taste. But if you sang ‘Annie Laurie,’ or something like that, you can imagine they’d bend their ears up in the skies--if they can hear that far--and say: ‘Isn’t that nice?’ That’s what I said to Mrs. Baron. Some spiel, wasn’t it?” Baron was glad that she turned to him for only the briefest scrutiny. “And--what did mother say?” he wanted to know. “I thought she was going to have the curtain let down for a minute. She looked so funny. But you see, she knew I was right. Anybody could see that. She stared at me. And I stared at her, too--only mine was different. Mine was what you call a baby stare. Innocent, you know.” She turned to him again, and something in his eyes checked her. “Oh, I know how that sounded to you,” she said with quick remonstrance. “You never put things like that into words. But you know very well everybody _does_ have special ways of looking when they want to. As if they didn’t understand, or as if they were surprised--or weren’t. You have to do things like that. That’s all I meant.” “I--think I understand,” said Baron. They remained silent for a time, and through Baron’s mind a single phrase kept running: “Like raised letters for the blind.” Wasn’t cynicism, wherever it existed, merely a protest by people of refined taste against the inartistic forms which goodness often assumed? And hadn’t he and his family always paid far too little heed to the golden legends of life, and too much to the desire to have them in “raised letters”?