CHAPTER VIII TRAITS The first evening at the Bogarts' was a trying one for Minga. Her life, the restless, high-strung, half-bred and wholly careless life of her age, had kept her taut as a little bowstring for sensation. It was a life formed, not so much on its own desires, as on highly colored superficial presentments in the moving pictures and theatre posters, also on those remarkably insinuating sheets, the "Society" Fashion Magazines, where the cut of one's coat and the number of one's pockets are prophesied between photographs of the important Mrs. So-and-So, or the gossiping and not too scrupulous Madame X. The rather uninspired family dinner ended amid the soft perfunctory observances of Miss Aurelia, punctuating the indifferent curt ejaculations of the young people and the moody silence of the Judge; then Minga took a hand. She sat at the table humming a little air. "Know that?" she inquired of Dunstan; "that's 'Don't take off another thing, Polly, my dear.' Piggy Purse-proud sings it in 'The Other Pair of Stockings.'" These statements were received in silence. Sard and Dunstan, mindful of the Judge's preferences in dinner conversation, looked askance at each other, but Minga glanced brightly around the table. To this young person there were no inhibitions, no reserves; above all, she was no respecter of persons. A man who had just completed a new up-to-date garage or aeroplane would win her casual interest, but a mere upholder of the laws of the country seemed to her hardly to have outline. Curiously enough, however, her insouciance and matter-of-fact pertness sometimes reached to that buried stream of human sensation that underlay the granite of Bogart's surface. As he looked at the little figure, now rising from the table, he noted the color of her dress and spoke of it. "Let me see, that's rose color, isn't it?" remarked the Judge, stiffly. His wrinkled square-nailed hand was on the back of the chair, and his eyes, gooseberry and hard, yet had the sort of deference a man gives some charming face and figure that refreshes him. Minga's head, bent back, looked coolly up into his face. "That color, Judgie"--it was her absurd intimate title for him--"that color is called 'Sauce Box.'" "Well named." The Judge had for a second a glint in his eyes. "Isn't it?" asked Minga. She turned her bobbed head with the lively shake of a young animal and asked suavely: "Now what, for instance, is the name of the cloth of your coat?" "Ha!" ... Dunstan, prowling about, looking for cigarettes, upset a pile of books and arrested a plundering hand. He winked at Sard over Minga's unconscious head, saying meanwhile plaintively, "Why can't I find any matches? This family sinks lower every day!" Dunstan watched to see how his father was taking Minga's innocent question. "What kind of cloth does a Chief Justice wear, anyhow; something impenetrable, I suppose, calculated to endure, impervious to shouts and howls and woman's tears," he ventured.