compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might
interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it
was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder
case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued
Sylvester.

"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the
slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so
often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real
Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their
love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth
Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor
folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here
have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about
'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?"

He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered,
oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly
through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the
subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.

"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once
after a particularly deplorable failure.

"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon
you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks,
in--what's the name of the foreign part?--Normandy? No friends of your
own age? No beaux?"

Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a