“Just the same you never heard me nag for trips.  The going’s too good at home.  Did you, pop, ever hear me nag?”

“Ja, it’s a lot your papa worries about what’s what!  Look at him there behind his paper, like it was a law he had to read every word!  Ray, go get me my glasses under the clock and call in your sister.  Them novels will keep.  Mind me when I talk, Ray!”

Miss Ray Binswanger rose reluctantly, placing the book face downward on the blue-and-white table coverlet.  It was as if seventeen Indian summers had laid their golden blush upon her.  Imperceptibly, too, the lanky, prankish years were folding back like petals, revealing the first bloom of her, a suddenly cleared complexion and eyes that had newly learned to drop upon occasion.

“Honest, mamma, do you think it would hurt Izzy to make a move once in a while?  He was the one made her cry, anyway, guying her about spaghetti on the brain.”

“Sure I did.  Wasn’t she running down my profesh?  She’s got to go to Europe for the summer, because the traveling salesmen she meets at home ain’t good enough for her.  Well, of all the nerve!”

“Just look at him, mamma, stretched out on the sofa there like he was a king!”

Full flung and from a tufted leather couch Isadore Binswanger turned on his pillow, flashing his dark eyes and white teeth full upon her.

“Go chase yourself, Blackey!”

“Blackey!  Let me just tell you, Mr. Smarty, that alongside of you I’m so blond I’m dizzy.”

“Come and give your big brother a French kiss, Blackey.”

“Like fun I will!”

“Do what I say or I’ll—­”

Mrs. Binswanger rapped her darning-ball with a thimbled finger.

“Izzy, stop teasing your sister.”

“You just ask me to press your white-flannel pants for you the next time you want to play Palm Beach with yourself, and see if I do it or not.  You just ask me!”

He made a great feint of lunging after her, and she dodged behind her mother’s rocking-chair, tilting it sharply.

“Children!”

“Mamma, don’t you let him touch me!”

“You—­you little imp, you!”

“Children!”

“I tell you, ma, that kid’s getting too fresh.”

“You spoil her, Izzy, more as any one.”

“It’s those yellow novels, and that gang of drugstore snips you let her run with will be her ruination.  If she was my kid I bet I’d have kept her in school another year.”

“You shut up, Izzy Binswanger, and mind your own business.  You never even went as long as me.”

“With a boy it’s different.”

“You better lay pretty low, Izzy Binswanger, or I can tell a few tales.  I guess I didn’t see you the night after you got in from your last trip, in your white-flannel pants I pressed, dancing on the Brighton boat with that peroxide queen alrighty.”

This time his face darkened with the blood of anger.