“Oh, don’t!  You’ll get your clean suit all dirty!” cried Sylvia, springing forward to lift him out of the well-tilled black loam.  Arnold thrust her hand away and made a visible effort to increase his specific gravity.  “I hope to the Lord I do get it dirty!” he said bitterly.

“Isn’t it your best?” asked Sylvia, aghast.  “Have you another?” “I haven’t anything but!” said the boy savagely.  “There’s a whole trunk full of them!” He was fumbling with a rough clumsiness at the lacing of his shoes, but made no progress in loosening them, and now began kicking at the grass.  “I don’t know how to get them off!” he cried, his voice breaking nervously.  Judith was down on her knees, inspecting with a competent curiosity the fastenings, which were of a new variety.

“It’s easy!” she said.  “You just lift this little catch up and turn it back, and that lets you get at the knot.”  As she spoke, she acted, her rough brown little fingers tugging at the silken laces.  “How’d you ever get it fastened,” she inquired, “if you don’t know how to unfasten it?”

“Oh, Pauline puts my shoes on for me,” explained Arnold.  “She dresses and undresses me.”

Judith stopped and looked up at him.  “Who’s Pauline?” she asked, disapproving astonishment in her accent.

“Madrina’s maid.”

Judith pursued him further with her little black look of scorn.  “Who’s Madrina?”

“Why—­you know—­your Aunt Victoria—­my stepmother—­she married my father when I was a little baby—­she doesn’t want me to call her ‘mother’ so I call her Madrina.’  That’s Italian for—­”

Judith had no interest in this phenomenon and no opinion about it.  She recalled the conversation to the point at issue with her usual ruthless directness.  “And you wouldn’t know how to undress yourself if somebody didn’t help you!” She went on loosening the laces in a contemptuous silence, during which the boy glowered resentfully at the back of her shining black hair.  Sylvia essayed a soothing remark about what pretty shoes he had, but with small success.  Already the excursion was beginning to take on the color of its ending,—­an encounter between the personalities of Judith and Arnold, with Sylvia and Lawrence left out.  When the shoes finally came off, they revealed white silk half-hose, which, discarded in their turn, showed a pair of startlingly pale feet, on which the new boy now essayed wincingly to walk.  “Ouch!  Ouch!  OUCH!” he cried, holding up first one and then the other from contact with the hot sharp-edged pebbles of the path, “How do you do it?”

“Oh, it always hurts when you begin in the spring,” said Judith carelessly.  “You have to get used to it.  How old are you?”

“Ten, last May.”

“Buddy here began going barefoot last summer and he’s only four,” she stated briefly, proceeding towards the barn and chicken-house.