, of the last of her eclair. They might have been
brother and sister in a common nursery.

"My! Aren't you pretty, Sylvia!" was Arnold's next remark. "You're a
regular peach; do you know it?" He turned to the others: "Say, let's
go to a show this afternoon," he proposed. "Tling-Tling's in town. I
saw it in the papers as I came in. The original company's singing.
Did you ever hear them?" he asked Sylvia. "They beat the other road
companies all hollow."

Sylvia shook her head. She had never heard the name before, the
Broadway brand of comic opera being outside her experience to a degree
which would have been inconceivable to Arnold.

There was some discussion over the matter, but in the end, apparently
because there was nothing else to do with Arnold, they all did go
to the "show," Arnold engineering the expedition with a trained
expertness in the matter of ticket-sellers, cabs, and ushers which was
in odd contrast to his gawky physical immaturity. At all the stages
of the process where it was possible, he smoked cigarettes, producing
them in rapid succession out of a case studded with little pearls. His
stepmother looked on at this, her beautiful manner of wise tolerance
tightening up a little, and after dinner, as they sat in a glittering
corridor of the hotel to talk, she addressed him suddenly in a quite
different tone. "I don't want you to do that so much, Arnold," she
said. His hand was fumbling for his case again. "You're too young to
smoke at all," she said definitely. He went on with his automatic
movements, opening the case, taking out a cigarette and tapping it on
the cover. "Oh, all the fellows do," he said rebelliously, and struck
a match.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith aroused herself to a sudden, low-toned, iron
masterfulness of voice and manner which, for all its quietness, had
the quality of a pistol shot in the family group. She said only, "Put
away that cigarette"; but by one effort of her will she massed against
the rebellion of his disorganized adolescence her mature, well-ripened
capacity to get her own way. She held him with her eyes as an
animal-trainer is supposed to cow his snarling, yellow-fanged
captives, and in a moment Arnold, with a pettish gesture, blew out the
match and shut the cigarette case with a snap. Mrs. Marshall-Smith
forbore to over-emphasize her victory by a feather-weight of gloating,
and turned to her sister-in-law with a whimsical remark about the
preposterousness of one of the cos