After that remark the new boy walked forward with no more articulate complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips.  He was shown the chicken-yard—­full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding their down and growing their feathers—­and forgot his feet in the fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering scrambles.  He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of the limp, unresponsive little bunches of fur in his arms, and feed a lettuce-leaf into its twitching pink mouth.  He was shown the house-in-the-maple-tree, a rough floor fixed between two large branches, with a canvas roof over it, ensconced in which retreat his eyes shone with happy excitement.  He was evidently about to make some comment on it, but glanced at Judith’s dark handsome little face, unsmiling and suspicious, and remained silent.  He tried the same policy when being shown the children’s own garden, but Judith tracked him out of this attempt at self-protection with some direct and searching questions, discovering in him such ignorance of the broadest division-lines of the vegetable kingdom that she gave herself up to open scorn, vainly frowned down by the more naturally civilized Sylvia, who was by no means enjoying herself.  The new boy was not in the least what he had looked.  She longed to return to the contemplation of Aunt Victoria’s perfections.  Lawrence was, as usual, deep in an unreal world of his own, where he carried forth some enterprise which had nothing to do with any one about him.  He was frowning and waving his arms, and making stabbing gestures with his fingers, and paid no attention to the conversation between Judith and the new boy.

“What can you do?  What do you know?” asked the former at last.

“I can ride horseback,” said Arnold defiantly.

Judith put him to the test at once, leading the way to the stall which was the abode of the little pinto broncho, left them, she explained, as a trust by one of Father’s students from the Far West, who was now graduated and a civil engineer in Chicago, where it cost too much to keep a horse.  Arnold emerged from this encounter with the pony with but little more credit than he had earned in the garden, showing an ineptness about equine ways which led Judith through an unsparing cross-examination to the information that the boy’s experience of handling a horse consisted in being ready in a riding-costume at a certain hour every afternoon, and mounting a well-broken little pony, all saddled and bridled, which was “brought round” to the porte-cochere.

“What’s a porte-cochere?” she asked, with her inimitable air of despising it, whatever it might turn out to be.

Arnold stared with an attempt to copy her own frank scorn for another’s ignorance.  “Huh!  Don’t you even know that much?  It’s the big porch without any floor to it, where carriages drive up so you can get in and out without getting wet if it rains.  Every house that’s good for anything has one.”