That was the proper beginning of as freakish a companionship as that habitat for curious intimacies and spiteful enmities, Mrs. H. Spicer's, had ever seen. Of a younger man, of a man who had been indubitable flesh and blood, Tobe Daly might have felt, in a way of speaking, jealous. At least he would have been annoyed that an interloper should all of a sudden come between him and his desires upon this casual little Doll Tearsheet of the theater who called herself Blossom Lamar Clayton. But of a man old enough to be the kid's grandfather, almost old enough to be her great-grandfather--furthermore a pompous, stilted, stupid, toploftical old dodo who behaved more like something out of one of these old-timey before-the-war novels than a regular honest-to-gracious human being--well, to be jealous of such a man would be just plain downright foolish, that's all. For Tobe an attitude of contemptuousness appeared to be the indicated mood. So he rode, as the saying goes, the high horse, and only once did he take advantage of a favoring opportunity openly to twit the girl regarding her choice of beaux. "That will be about all from you," she snapped at him, using back-stage language. "I'm picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He may not be on to you--he's too decent and polite himself to suspect anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly--but I'm on. So I'm serving notice on you to quit it because if you don't, the first thing you know you'll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I was raised that way. I guess it's a kind of a tip-off on the way I was raised that I had to wait until I met a man who'll be eighty his next birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she was a lady." Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her. "Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?" "I never found out," she said. "I never knew before. But I'm taking lessons now."