"Why don't you begin?" she presently broke off to inquire.

"What a girl you are!" he said. He looked a bit sheepishly in the
direction of his father; then he stepped behind his sister, laid a hand
on each of her imperceptible biceps, and turned her face round to the
wall.

But Jane faced about at once. "Well, then, he paints--"

She dragged him toward the centre-table, grasped his wrist, and forced
him to make several dabs and passes at the fatal newspaper, which still
lay there with a bland impassivity between drop-light and book-rack.
"That's how we dash off our little sketches," she declared.

"Goodness, Jane!" cried Alice, "you've almost upset the whole inkstand!"

"And what else is there?" cried Jane, whose mood was mounting higher. She
clamped her hand on her disordered bang. "Why, of course! He
fences!--aha!"

To this address Truesdale allowed himself to respond. He had no wish to
obtrude his musical and artistic doings upon his father until a more
definite _modus vivendi_ had been brought about; but he could no longer
lend himself passively to being made an absurdity by the over-enthusiasm
of his sister. Fencing, now, was a manly art of which his father might
not disapprove.

"On guard!" he cried. With his right hand he snatched up a paper-cutter
from the table, curled up his left arm behind him, threw one of his long