But before I could answer, Sagner had pushed me utterly aside once more and was shaking his smoke-stained finger threateningly in Madge Hubert's face. "Why--didn't--you--come--to the--Lennarts'--to--dinner--to-night --as--you--were--invited?" he scolded. The girl put her chin in her hand and cuddled her fingers over her mouth and her nose and part of her blue eyes. "I don't go to the Lennarts' any more--if I can help it," she mumbled. "Why not?" shouted Sagner. She considered the question very carefully, then "Go ask the other girls," she answered a trifle hotly. "Go ask any one of them. We all stay away for exactly the same reason." "WHAT IS THE REASON?" thundered Sagner in his most terrible laboratory manner. When Sagner speaks like that to me, I always grab hold of my head with both hands and answer just as fast as I possibly can, for I remember only too distinctly all the shining assortment of different sized knives and scalpels in his workshop and I have always found that a small, narrow, quick question makes the smallest, narrowest, quickest, soon-overest incision into my secret. But Madge Hubert only laughed at the laboratory manner. "Say 'Please,'" she whispered. "Please!" growled Sagner, with his very own blood flushing all over his face and hands. "Now--what is it you want to know?" she asked, frittering her fingers all the time over that inky-looking pack of catalogue cards. Somehow, strange as it may seem, I did not feel an atom in the way, but rather that the presence of a third person, and that person myself, gave them both a certain daring bravado of speech that they would scarcely have risked alone with each other. "What do I want to know?" queried Sagner. "I want to know--in fact--I'm utterly mad to know--just what your kind of woman thinks of 'Little Sister's' kind of woman." With a startled gesture Madge Hubert looked back over her shoulder toward a creak in the literature book-stack, and Sagner jumped up with a great air of mock conspiracy, and went tip-toeing all around among the metal corridors in search of possible eavesdroppers, and then came flouncing back and stuffed tickly tissue paper into the gray cat's ears. Then "Why don't you girls go to the Lennarts' any more?" he resumed with quickly recurrent gravity. For a moment Madge Hubert dallied to shuffle one half of her pack of cards into the other half. Then she looked up and smiled the blond way a white-birch tree smiles in the sunshine. "Why--we don't go any more because we don't have a good time," she confided. "After you've come home from a party once or twice and cried yourself to sleep, it begins to dawn on you very gradually that you didn't have a very good time. We don't like 'Little Sister.' She makes us feel ashamed." "Oh!" said Sagner, rather brutally. "You are all jealous!" But if he had expected for a second to disconcert Madge Hubert he was most ingloriously mistaken. "Yes," she answered perfectly simply. "We are all jealous."