ed. She was angry. "Lanny, you have something to explain," she
thought.

But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the
veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had
made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion.

IX

A SUNDAY MORNING CALL

As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the
influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both
grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true
gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to
arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the
nursery floor; and he would rather read about the wonders of natural
history and electricity than the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the
Great and my lord Nelson. Left to his own choice, he would miss the
parade of the garrison for inspection by an excellency in order to ask
questions of a man wiping the oil off his hands with cotton-waste, who
was far more entertaining to him than the most spick-and-span ramrod of
a sergeant.

The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound. This was
even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with
his foot. His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Caesar,
self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than
his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence
after his father had been transferred to another post. He was given to
magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a
tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the
family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head
off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in
him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his
picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his
skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was that they
were all "experts" in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.

Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile
that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or
persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed
off his eyebrows. This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead
languages at times, with a towel tied around his head. He complained
that they were out of date; and