issentingly.

"I wish I could think so, Dane; but I am afraid I should only disappoint
you," he answered, and his tone was not altogether jovial, as he said
it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"I don't expect to be consistent," Sally retorted. "I'm only an
ill-assorted snarl of threads ravelled out from my different ancestors."

"That's dodging the responsibility, Miss Van Osdel."

Bobby lifted an oyster and held it up to view.

"I never did approve of shunting off our sins on the shoulders of our
ancestors," he observed. "They sin; we get the come-uppance. You might
as well say that the grandfather of this oyster is directly responsible
for his being eaten alive."

"No man's sin is wholly his own doing," Lorimer said half bitterly.

There was a sudden pause, as they all came to a realizing sense that
Sally's idle words had sent them sliding out upon thin ice. Bobby was
the first to rally.

"True for you, Lorimer!" he assented cheerily. "That is one of the
doctrines I have spent my life trying to impress on the governor. I
wish he felt it more borne in upon him. But, as you were saying, Sally,
you're not expecting to become consistent. I'm glad, for you won't be
disappointed. The brightest jewel in your crown will have to be of
another color."

"What color is consistency, Bobby?" his cousin asked.

"Green, of course, reflected from the jealous eyes of the ninety and
nine sinners who haven't the virtue."

"I'm not at all certain that I wish to be consistent," Sally asserted.

"So glad for your sake!" Bobby returned quickly.

Thayer looked up inquiringly.

"Because consistent people are such bores, Miss Van Osdel?"

"So you are a heretic, too? And then they are so smug."

"But there's consistency and consistency," Bobby argued. "There's mashed
potato and frappe, for instance, equally hard, equally homogeneous, yet
totally different. To my mind, there is a distinct choice between them,
and I prefer--"

"Cherries in your frappe." Sally capped his sentence for him. "In other
words, we all like a consistent person with lumps of inconsistency.
That's myself, and one of my lumps is a dislike of having Mrs. Lloyd
Avalons on our tenement committee."

"But, if you are slumming--"

"That is ignoble of you, Beatrix. The committee doesn't slum within its
own confines."

"Oh, I didn't mean that at all," Beatrix protested hastily. "Really,
though. I can't see why you and Mrs. Lloyd Avalons can't unite in
working