Professor Lennart's fad, as I have said, was history. Mrs. Lennart's fad was presumably housekeeping. The sister-in-law's fad was unmistakably men. Like an electric signboard her fascinating, spectacular sex-vanity flamed and flared from her coyly drooped eyes to her showy little feet. Every individual gesture signaled distinctly, "I am an extraordinarily beautiful little woman." Now it was her caressing hand on Lennart's shoulder; now it was her maddening, dazzling smile hurled like a bombshell into Sagner's perfectly prosy remark about the weather, now it was her teasing lips against the boy's tousled hair; now it was her tip-toeing, swaying, sweet-breathed exploration of a cobweb that the linden trees had left across my shoulder. Lennart was evidently utterly subjugated. Like a bright moth and a very dull flame the girl chased him unceasingly from one chair, or one word, or one laugh to another. A dozen times their hands touched, or their smiles met, or their thoughts mated in distinctly personal if not secret understanding. Once when Mrs. Lennart stopped suddenly in the midst of my best story and asked me to repeat what I had been saying, I glanced up covertly and saw the girl kissing the tip of her finger a little bit over-mockingly to her brother-in-law. Never in any country but America could such a whole scene have been enacted in absolute moral innocence. It made me half ashamed and half very proud of my country. In continental Europe even the most trivial, innocent audacity assumes at once such utterly preposterous proportions of evil. But here before my very eyes was the most dangerous man-and-woman game in the world being played as frankly and ingenuously and transiently as though it had been croquet. Through it all, Sagner, frowning like ten devils, sat at the desk with his chin in his hands, staring--staring at the girl. I suppose that she thought he was fascinated. He was. He was fairly yearning to vivisect her. I had seen that expression before in his face--reverence, repulsion, attraction, distaste, indomitable purpose, blood-curdling curiosity--SCIENCE. When I dragged him out of the room and down the steps half an hour later my sides were cramped with laughter. "If we'd stayed ten minutes longer," I chuckled, "she would have called you 'Bertie' and me 'Boy.'" But Sagner would not laugh. "She's a pretty girl all right," I ventured again. "Pretty as h--," whispered Sagner. As we rounded the corner of the house the long French window blazed forth on us. Clear and bright in the lamplight stood Lennart with his right arm cuddling the girl to his side. "Little sister," he was saying, "let's go back to the piano and have some more music." Smiling her kindly good night we saw Mrs. Lennart gather up her books and start off limpingly across the hall, with the devoted boy following close behind her. "Then she's really lame?" I asked Sagner as we swung into the noisy gravel path.