“What makes it?” asked Benito, suddenly interested. “I don’t know; perhaps playing the piano,” she said, feeling the necessity of having to dissemble. “I’d like to be able to make my hand shake that way,” Benito observed enviously. “When grandma had the chills I used to watch her. But she shook all over. Sometimes her teeth used to click. Do your teeth ever click?” The subject interested him and furnished food for conversation till they reached their car and were swept homeward over the low hills, breaking here and there into sand, and with the little oaks crouching in grotesque fear before the winds. CHAPTER XV THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY “Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment. Thou hast showed thy people hard things.”--PSALMS. The third boarder at the Garcias’ was Isaac Pierpont, the teacher of singing. The Garcia house offered, at least, the one recommendation of being a place wherein musically inclined lodgers might make the welkin ring with the sounds of their industry and no voice be raised in protest. Between the pounding of her own pupils Mariposa could hear the voices of Pierpont’s as they performed vocal prodigies under their teacher’s goadings. The young man was unusual and interesting. He had a “method” which he expounded to Mariposa during the process of meals. It was founded on a large experience of voices in general and a close anatomical study of the vocal chords. All he wanted, he said, to demonstrate its excellence to the world was a voice. Mrs. Garcia, who used to drop in on Mariposa with her head tied up in white swathings and a broom in her hand, had early in their acquaintance given her a life history of the two other boarders, with a running accompaniment of her own comments. Pierpont had not her highest approval, as he was exasperatingly indifferent to money, being bound, to the exclusion of all lesser interests, on the search for his voice. Half his pupils were taught for nothing and the other half forgot to pay, or Pierpont forgot to send in his bills, which was the same thing in the end, Mrs. Garcia thought. “I can’t see what’s the good of working,” she said, daintily brushing the surface of the carpet with her broom, “if you don’t make anything by your work. What’s the sense of it, I’d like to know?”