"Oh, that!" said my enlightened hostess. "That's nothing; just a little bunch of calves being weaned. We never notice that--and say, they got the groom's mother in here, too. Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors--Mrs. Angus McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation! I bet they didn't need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over her person. They could have took her in a coal cellar." "How do you expect to sleep with all that going on?" I insisted. "All what? Oh, them calves. That's nothing! Angus says to her when they first got money: 'Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!' He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only afford a few. Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he says. What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald? You'd think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him say it from the heart out. And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him. Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.' Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her at the time." I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night. It helped a little. I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears trained in rejection. That helped more. I could hear her now, save in the more passionate intervals of the chorus. "All right, then. What was the funny blow-up?" She caught the significance of the closed door and window. "But that's music," she insisted. "Why, I'd like to have a good record of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I could play it on a phonograph when I'm off visiting--only it would make me too homesick." She glanced at the closed door and window in a way that I found sinister. "I couldn't hear you," I suggested.