ing-room. You remember it--a table and a watermelon sliced open,
and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with two dead
prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-store years and
years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any they saw in the
museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's horribly out of
date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn
giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told
papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he
did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me
tired! Sibyl!"

Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to
awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full
gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation
of her sister-in-law.

"SIBYL!" she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed
to strike fire on her lips. "I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have
married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good! He could
have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and
Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but instead of
that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some awfully
nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic City, last
spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even HEARD of 'em!"

"I thought you were great friends with Sibyl," Bibbs said.

"Up to the time I found her out!" the sister returned, with continuing
vehemence. "I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan
lately--"

"It's only lately?"

"Well--" Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. "Of course, I
always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about
ROSCOE!"

"It seems," said Bibbs, in laconic protest, "that she married him."

The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous
laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: "Why, she'd have
married YOU!"

"No, no," he said; "she couldn't be that bad!"

"I didn't mean--" she began, distressed. "I only meant--I didn't mean--"

"Never mind, Edith," he consoled her. "You see, she couldn't have
married me, because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as
mercenary as all that she'd have been too clever. The head doctor even
had to lend me the money for my ticket home."

"I didn't mean anything unpleasant about