Sylvia was accustomed to finding Professor Kennedy’s remarks quite unintelligible, and this one seemed no odder to her than the rest, so that she was astonished that Aunt Victoria was not ashamed to confess as blank an ignorance as the little girl’s.  The beautiful woman leaned toward the morose old man with the suave self-confidence of one who has never failed to charm, and drew his attention to her by a laugh of amused perplexity.  “May I ask,” she inquired, “what kind of a husband is that?  It is a new variety to me.”

Professor Kennedy looked at her appraisingly.  “It’s the kind most women aspire to,” he answered enigmatically.  He imparted to this obscure remark the air of passing a sentence of condemnation.

Sylvia’s mother stirred uneasily in her chair and looked at her husband.  He had begun to take his viola from the case, but now returned it and stood looking quizzically from his sister to his guest.  “Professor Kennedy talks a special language, Vic,” he said lightly.  “Some day he’ll make a book of it and be famous.  He divides us all into two kinds:  the ones that get what they want by taking it away from other people—­those are the dolichocephalic blonds—­though I believe it doesn’t refer to the color of their hair.  The other kind are the white folks, the unpredatory ones who have scruples, and get pushed to the wall for their pains.”

Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned to the young man beside her.  “It makes one wonder, doesn’t it,” she conjectured pleasantly, “to which type one belongs oneself?”

In this welcome shifting from the abstract to the understandably personal, old Reinhardt saw his opportunity.  “Ach, womens, beautifool and goot womens!” he cried in his thick, kindly voice.  “Dey are abofe being types.  To every good man, dey can be only wie eine blume, so hold and schoen—­”

Professor Kennedy’s acid voice broke in—­“So you’re still in the 1830 Romantische Schule period, are you, Reinhardt?” He went on to Mrs. Marshall-Smith:  “But there is something in that sort of talk.  Women, especially those who consider themselves beautiful and good, escape being either kind of type, by the legerdemain with which they get what they want, and yet don’t soil their fingers with predatory acts.”

Mrs. Marshall-Smith was, perhaps, a shade tardy in asking the question which he had evidently cast his speech to extract from her, but after an instant’s pause she brought it out bravely.  “How in the world do you mean?” she asked, smiling, and received, with a quick flicker of her eyelids, the old man’s response of, “They buy a dolichocephalic blond to do their dirty work for them and pay for him with their persons.”