"That's jest what I do mean. I know it sounds like I was batty, but let me tell more. Well, it seemed queer that there shouldn't be any one magazine took in both houses, but, of course, that wasn't no real proof. I only noticed it, an' it set me a thinkin'. Then I sized up their situations. Mrs. Schuyler's dignified an' quiet in her ways, simple in her dress, wears only poils, no other sparklers whatever. Vicky Van's gay of action, likes giddy rags, and adores gorgeous jewelry, even if it ain't the most realest kind. Now, wait--don't interrup' me, Lemme talk it out. 'Cause it's killin' me, an' I gotter get it over with. Well, all Mrs. Schuyler's things--furnicher, I mean--is big an' heavy an' massive, an' terrible expensive. Yes, I know her husband made her have it that way. But never mind that. Vicky Van's furnicher is all gay an' light an' pretty an' dainty colorin' and so forth. And the day the old sister-in-laws was in here they said, 'How Ruth would admire to have things like these! 'Member how she begged Randolph to do up her boodore in wicker an' pink silk?' That's what they said! Oh, well, I got a bug then that the two ladies I'm talkin' about was just the very oppositest I ever did see! Then, another thing was the records. The phonygraft in here is full of light opery and poplar music like that. Not a smell o' fugues and classic stuff. An' in at Schuyler's, as we seen to-night, there's no gay songs, no comic operas, no ragtime." "But, Terence," I broke in, "that all proves nothing! The Schuylers don't care for ragtime and Vicky Van does. You mustn't distort those plain facts to fit your absurd theory!" "Yes," he said, his eyes burning as they glared into mine. "An' Mr. Schuyler he wouldn't never let his wife go to the light operas or vodyville, an' she hadn't any records, so how--_how_, I ask you, comes it that she's so familiar with the song about 'My Pearlie Girlie' that she joined in the singin' of it with me at the dinner table to-night? That's what clinched it. Mrs. Schuyler, she knew that song's well as I did, and she picked it up where I left off and hummed it straight to the end--words _and_ music! How'd she know it, I say?" "Why, she might have picked that up anywhere. She goes to see friends, I've no doubt, who are not so straight-laced as the Schuylers, and they play light tunes for her." "Not likely. I've run down her friends, and they're all old fogies like the sister dames or like old man Schuyler himself. The old ladies are nearly sixty and Mr. Schuyler was fifty odd, and all their friends are along about those ages, and Mrs. Schuyler, she ain't got any friends of her own age at all. But, as Vicky Van, she has friends of her own age, yes, an' her own tastes, an' her own ways of life an' livin.' An' she's got the record of 'My Pearlie Girlie.'"