Without speaking, Judith pulled her long, smooth braid around over her shoulder where she could protect the end of it.  Her mouth was also full, bulgingly, of the last of her eclair.  They might have been brother and sister in a common nursery.

“My!  Aren’t you pretty, Sylvia!” was Arnold’s next remark.  “You’re a regular peach; do you know it?” He turned to the others:  “Say, let’s go to a show this afternoon,” he proposed.  “Tling-Tling’s in town.  I saw it in the papers as I came in.  The original company’s singing.  Did you ever hear them?” he asked Sylvia.  “They beat the other road companies all hollow.”

Sylvia shook her head.  She had never heard the name before, the Broadway brand of comic opera being outside her experience to a degree which would have been inconceivable to Arnold.

There was some discussion over the matter, but in the end, apparently because there was nothing else to do with Arnold, they all did go to the “show,” Arnold engineering the expedition with a trained expertness in the matter of ticket-sellers, cabs, and ushers which was in odd contrast to his gawky physical immaturity.  At all the stages of the process where it was possible, he smoked cigarettes, producing them in rapid succession out of a case studded with little pearls.  His stepmother looked on at this, her beautiful manner of wise tolerance tightening up a little, and after dinner, as they sat in a glittering corridor of the hotel to talk, she addressed him suddenly in a quite different tone.  “I don’t want you to do that so much, Arnold,” she said.  His hand was fumbling for his case again.  “You’re too young to smoke at all,” she said definitely.  He went on with his automatic movements, opening the case, taking out a cigarette and tapping it on the cover.  “Oh, all the fellows do,” he said rebelliously, and struck a match.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith aroused herself to a sudden, low-toned, iron masterfulness of voice and manner which, for all its quietness, had the quality of a pistol shot in the family group.  She said only, “Put away that cigarette”; but by one effort of her will she massed against the rebellion of his disorganized adolescence her mature, well-ripened capacity to get her own way.  She held him with her eyes as an animal-trainer is supposed to cow his snarling, yellow-fanged captives, and in a moment Arnold, with a pettish gesture, blew out the match and shut the cigarette case with a snap.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith forbore to over-emphasize her victory by a feather-weight of gloating, and turned to her sister-in-law with a whimsical remark about the preposterousness of one of the costumes passing.  Arnold sulked in silence until Judith, emerging from her usual self-contained reticence, made her first advance to him.  “Let’s us all go there by the railing where we can look down into the central court,” she suggested, and having a nodded permission from their elders, the three children walked away.