Sylvester, considering her question, turned his emerald slowly.

“The girls are all right, Miss Sheila.  They’re lookers.  I guess I’ve spoiled ’em some.  They’ll be crazy over you—­sort of a noo pet in the house, eh?  I’ve wired to ’em.  They must be hoppin’ up and down like a popper full of corn.”

“And Mrs. Hudson?”

Sylvester grinned—­the wrinkle cutting long and deep across his lip.  “Well, ma’am, she ain’t the hoppin’ kind.”

A few minutes later Sheila discovered that emphatically she was not the hopping kind.  A great, bony woman with a wide, flat, handsome face, she came along the station platform, kissed Sylvester with hard lips and stared at Sheila ... the stony stare of her kind.

“Babe ran the Ford down, Sylly,” she said in the harshest voice Sheila had ever heard.  “Where’s the girl’s trunk?”

Sylvester’s sallow face reddened.  He turned quickly to Sheila.

“Run over to the car yonder, Miss Sheila, and get used to Babe, while I kind of take the edge off Momma.”

Sheila did not run.  She walked in a peculiar light-footed manner which gave her the look of a proud deer.

“Momma” was taken firmly to the baggage-room, where, it would seem, the edge was removed with difficulty, for Sheila waited in the motor with Babe for half an hour.

Babe hopped.  She hopped out of her seat at the wheel and shook Sheila’s hand and told her to “jump right in.”

“Sit by me on the way home, Sheila.”  Babe had a tremendous voice.  “And leave the old folks to gossip on the back seat.  Gee! you’re different from what I thought you’d be.  Ain’t you small, though?  You’ve got no form.  Say, Millings will do lots for you.  Isn’t Pap a character, though?  Weren’t you tickled the way he took you up?  Your Poppa was a painter, wasn’t he?  Can you make a picture of me?  I’ve got a steady that would be just wild if you could.”

Sheila sat with hands clenched in her shabby muff and smiled her moonlight smile.  She was giddy with the intoxicating, heady air, with the brilliant sunset light, with Babe’s loud cordiality.  She wanted desperately to like Babe; she wanted even more desperately to be liked.  She was in an unimaginable panic, now.

Babe was a splendid young animal, handsome and round and rosy, her body crowded into a bright-blue braided, fur-trimmed coat, her face crowded into a tight, much-ornamented veil, her head with heavy chestnut hair, crowded into a cherry-colored, velvet turban round which seemed to be wrapped the tail of some large wild beast.  Her hands were ready to burst from yellow buckskin gloves; her feet, with high, thick insteps, from their tight, thin, buttoned boots, even her legs shone pink and plump below her short skirt, through silk stockings that were threatened at the seams.  And the blue of her eyes, the red of her cheeks, the white of her teeth, had the look of being uncontainable, too brilliant and full to stay where they belonged.  The whole creature flashed and glowed and distended herself.  Her voice was a riot of uncontrolled vitality, and, as though to use up a little of all this superfluous energy, she was violently chewing gum.  Except for an occasional slight smacking sound, it did not materially interfere with speech.