Wilbur studied her as he had studied Merle.  She was in better condition, he thought.  She came only to his shoulder as he stood to seat her, but she was no longer bony.  Her bones were neatly submerged.  Her hair was still rusty, the stain being deeper than he remembered, and the freckles were but piquant memories.  Here and there one shone faintly, like the few faint stars showing widely apart through cloud crevices on a murky night.  Her nose, though no longer precisely trivial, would never be the Whipple nose.  Its lines were now irrevocably set in a design far less noble.  Her gown was shining, of an elusive shade that made Wilbur think of ripe fruits—­chiefly apricots, he decided.  She was unquestionably what she had confessed herself to be—­a rattlepate.  She rattled now, with a little waiting, half-tremulous smile to mark her pauses, as if she knew people would weigh and find her wanting, but hoped for judgments tempered with mercy.

“Mad about the war?  I should think so!  Grandpa Gideon mad, and Harvey D.—­that dear thing’s going to do something at Washington for a dollar a year.  You’d think it was the only honest money he’d ever earned if you heard Merle talk about bankers sucking the life blood of the people.  Juliana taking charge of something and Mother Ella mad about knitting—­always tangled in yarn.  She’ll be found strangled in her own work some day.  And Uncle Sharon mad about the war, and fifty times madder about Merle.

“D’you see Merle’s picture in that New York paper yesterday?—­all hair and eyeglasses, and leaning one temple on the two first fingers of the right hand—­and guess what it said—­’Young millionaire socialist who denounces country’s entrance into war!’ Watch him—­he’s trying to look like the picture now!  Uncle Sharon read the ‘millionaire socialist,’ and barked like a mad dog.  He says:  ’Yes, he’d be a millionaire socialist if he was going to be any kind, and if he was going to be a burglar he’d have to be one of these dress-suit burglars you always read about.’

“Of course he’s awfully severe on Merle for not going to fight, but how could he with his bad eyes?  He couldn’t see to shoot at people, poor thing; and besides, he’s too clever to be wasted like a common soldier.  He starts people to thinking—­worth-while people.  He says so himself.  Mixed up with all sorts of clever things with the most wonderful names—­garment workers and poet radicals and vorticists and new-arters and everything like that, who are working to lift us up so nobody will own anything and everybody can have what he wants.  Of course I don’t understand everything they say, but it sounds good, so sympathetic, don’t you think?”

She had paused often with the little smile that implored pity for her rattlepatedness.  Now it prolonged itself as the orchestra became wildly alive.

Winona had but half listened to Patricia’s chatter.  She had been staring instead at the girl’s hair—­staring and wondering lawlessly.  She had seen advertisements.  Might her own hair be like that—­“like tarnished gold,” she put it?  Of course you had to keep putting the stuff on at the roots as it grew out.  But would her colour blend with that shade?  Patricia’s skin had the warm fairness of new milk, but Winona was dusky.  Perhaps a deeper tint of auburn——­