“He had scarcely dashed off when the host called my name several times outside the door.  Then he knocked and walked in, uninvited.  I told him that I would be inflexible about supper.  He must make my excuses to his charming friends; any pretext he chose.  He did not insist.  He took up his stand by the fireplace and began to talk; said rather intelligent things.  I did not drive him out; it was his own house, and he made himself agreeable.  After a time a deputation of his friends came down the hall, somewhat boisterously, to say that supper could not be served until we came down.  Stein was still standing by the mantel, I remember.  He scattered them, without moving or speaking to them, by a portentous look.  There is something hideously forceful about him.  He took a very profound leave of me, and said he would order his car at once.  In a moment Peppo arrived, splashed to the ankles, and we made our escape together.

“A week later Peppo came to me in a rage, with a paper called The American Gentleman, and showed me a page devoted to three photographs:  Mr. and Mrs. Siegmund Stein, lately married in New York City, and Kitty Ayrshire, operatic soprano, who sang at their house-warming.  Mrs. Stein and I were grinning our best, looked frantic with delight, and Siegmund frowned inscrutably between us.  Poor Peppo wasn’t mentioned.  Stein has a publicity sense.”

Tevis rose.

“And you have enormous publicity value and no discretion.  It was just like you to fall for such a plot, Kitty.  You’d be sure to.”

“What’s the use of discretion?” She murmured behind her hand.  “If the Steins want to adopt you into their family circle, they’ll get you in the end.  That’s why I don’t feel compassionate about your Ruby.  She and I are in the same boat.  We are both the victims of circumstance, and in New York so many of the circumstances are Steins.”

Paul’s Case

It was Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanours.  He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal’s office and confessed his perplexity about his son.  Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling.  His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole.  This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest.  His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy.  The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.