In their private parlor at the Melbourne, pompously furnished, and bare of all things that make a room reflective of personality, Mrs. Swink and her daughter were awaiting me on my arrival, and the moment I met the former all the perversity of which I am possessed rose up within me, and for the latter I was conscious of sympathy, based on nothing save intuitive antipathy to her mother.  Inwardly I warned myself to behave, but I wasn’t sure I was going to do it.

“Oh, how do you do!” Mrs. Swink, a fat, florid, frizzy person, waddled toward me with out-stretched and bejeweled hands, and took mine in hers.  “Mr. Thorne told us you would certainly call, and we’ve been waiting for you ever since he told us.  Charmed to meet you!  This is my daughter Madeleine.  Where’s Madeleine?” She turned her short, red neck, bound with velvet, and looked behind her.  “Oh, here she is!  Madeleine, this is Miss Wreath.  You know all about Miss Wreath, who’s gone to such a queer place to live.  Harrie told us.”  Two sharp little eyes sunk in nests of embracing flesh winked confidentially at first me and then her daughter.  “Yes, indeed, we know all about you.  Sit down.  Madeleine, push a chair up for Miss Wreath.”

“Heath, mother!” The girl called Madeleine turned her pretty, dissatisfied face toward her mother and then looked at me.  “She never gets names right.  She just hits at them and says the first thing that comes to her mind.”  Pulling a large chair close to a table, on which was a vase of American Beauty roses, she waited for me to take it, then went over to the window and sat beside it.

“Well, everybody’s got a mental weakness.”  Upright in a blue-brocaded chair, elbows on its gilt arms, mother Swink surveyed me with scrutinizing calculation, and as she appraised I appraised also.  Full-bosomed of body and short of leg, she looked close kin to a frog in her tight-fitting purple gown with its iridescent trimmings, and low-cut neck; and from her silver-buckled slippers to the crimped and russet-colored transformation on her head, which had slipped somewhat to one side, my eyes went up and then went down, and I knew if Harrie ever married her daughter his punishment would begin on earth.

“Yes, indeed, everybody’s got a mental weakness, and I’m thankful mine’s no worse than forgetting names.  I ought to remember yours, though.  It makes you think of funerals and weddings and things like that.  I love names which—­”

“Her name is Heath, mother! Not Wreath.”

“Oh yes—­of course!  This certainly is a beautiful day.  If El Paso hadn’t been so far away we’d have brought one of our cars with us, but I don’t see any sense spending all that money when you can hire cars so cheap by the hour.  Madeleine don’t like to ride in hired cars.  I like any kind of car.”

So far I had had no opportunity of doing more than bend my head, a chance to speak not having been permitted me, but, at her mother’s pause for breath, the girl at the window looked down upon the street and then turned her face toward me.  “That’s a pretty car you came in.  Can you drive it yourself?”