the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or
florid to any but American ears. In spite of the invariable good taste
with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless
speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching
art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his
voice. Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit
of rather apologizing for those rich and harmonious accents. The first
time she had heard it, Sylvia had thought of the G string of old
Reinhardt's violin.

"I never in my life saw anything that looked less like a shady place,"
observed Sylvia, indicating with an admiring gesture the table before
them, gleaming and flashing its glass and silver and close-textured,
glossy damask up into the light.

"It's _morally_ that we're so shady!" said Arnold, admiring his own
wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, "Not so bad, what?"
The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have
said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself
to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing
"high-brow" anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's
conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of
one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates
of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive
simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's
phrase for the situation was, "I let Madrina alone, and she don't
bother me." But now, seeing that neither the façade of Rouen, nor the
influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned, his unusual
loquacity continued. "Well, if one west wind (I don't mean that as a
slam on Sylvia for coming from west of the Mississippi) has done us so