"It's _morally_ that we're so shady!" said Arnold, admiring his own wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, "Not so bad, what?" The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing "high-brow" anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's phrase for the situation was, "I let Madrina alone, and she don't bother me." But now, seeing that neither the façade of Rouen, nor the influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned, his unusual loquacity continued. "Well, if one west wind (I don't mean that as a slam on Sylvia for coming from west of the Mississippi) has done us so much good, why not have another?" he inquired. "Why couldn't Judith come on and make us a visit too? It would be fun to have a scrap with her again." He explained to Morrison: "She's Sylvia's younger sister, and we always quarreled so, as kids, that after we'd been together half an hour the referee had to shoulder in between and tell us, 'Nix on biting in clinches.' She was great, all right, Judith was! How _is_ she now?" he asked Sylvia. "I've been meaning ever so many times to ask you about her, and something else has seemed to come up. I can't imagine Judy grown up. She hasn't pinned up that great long braid, has she, that used to be so handy to pull?" Sylvia took the last of her soup, put the spoon on the plate, and launched into a description of Judith, one of her favorite topics. "Oh, Judith's just _fine_! You ought to see her! She's worth ten of me: she has such lots of character! And handsome! You never saw anything like Judith's looks. Yes, she's put her hair up! She's twenty years old now, what do you _suppose_ she does with her hair? She wears it in a great smooth braid all around her head. And she has _such_ hair, Aunt Victoria!" She turned from Arnold to another woman, as from some one who would know nothing of the fine shades of the subject. "No short hairs at all, you know, like everybody else, that _will_ hang down and look untidy!" She pulled with an explanatory petulance at the soft curls which framed her own face in an aureole of light. "Hers is all long and smooth, and the color like a fresh chestnut, just out of the burr; and her nose is like a Greek statue--she _is_ a Greek statue!" She had been carried by her affectionate enthusiasm out of her usual self-possession, her quick divination of how she was affecting everybody, and now, suddenly finding Morrison's eyes on her with an expression she did not recognize, she was brought up short. What had she said to make him look at her so oddly?