They looked down into the great marble court, far below them, now fairy-like with carefully arranged electric lights, gleaming through the palms.  The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness of mere ant-like comings and goings.

“Not so bad,” said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased, looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery, the heavy gilding of the chairs....  Everything in sight exhaled an intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk, another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible—­the unwashed smell, floating up from the paupers’ cellars which support Aladdin’s palaces of luxury.

But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very common blending of odors.  Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious even of the more obvious of the two.  She was as insensitive to all about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning.  She might have been leaning over a picket fence.  “I wouldn’t give in to Her!” she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.

Arnold looked nettled.  “Oh, I don’t!  I don’t pay any attention to what she says, except when she’s around where I am, and that’s not so often you could notice it much! Saunders isn’t that kind!  Saunders is a gay old bird, I tell you!  We have some times together when we get going!”

It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years before, had been their young Professor Saunders.  She found that she remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet peace.  She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.

Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely:  “But it’s my belief that Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business!  Bad business!  He’s in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some way.”

Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly knowledge of the world.  Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the significance of Arnold’s words, dropped her eyes and blushed.  Arnold surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man of the world patting two pretty children on the head.

Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she had begun it.  “But you did give in to her!  You pretend you didn’t because you are ashamed.  She just looked you down.  I wouldn’t let anybody look me down; I wouldn’t give in to anybody!”