d's long sallow face was
indeed so noticeable that Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced sharply at him,
and then looked again with great satisfaction. She leaned to Sylvia
and laid her charming white hand affectionately over the girl's slim,
strong, tanned fingers. "It's just a joy to have you here, my dear.
You're brightening us stupid, bored people like fresh west wind!" She
went on addressing herself to the usual guest of the evening: "Isn't
it always the most beautiful sight, Felix, how the mere presence of
radiant youth can transform the whole atmosphere of life!"

"I hadn't noticed that my radiant youth had transformed much,"
commented Arnold dryly; "and Sylvia's only a year younger than I."

He was, as usual, disregarded by the course of the conversation. "Yes,
sunshine in a shady place ..." quoted Morrison, in his fine mellow
tenor, looking at Sylvia. It was a wonderful voice, used with
discretion, with a fine instinct for moderation which would have kept
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