“How do you like it?” I demanded, referring to the monstrous din.

“It’s great,” she said, plainly referring to something else.  “One of them real upty-up weddings in high life, with orchestras and bowers of orchids and the bride a vision of loveliness—­”

“I mean the noise.”

“What noise?” She put the paper aside and stared at me, listening intently.  I saw that she was honestly puzzled, even as the chorus swelled to unbelievable volume.  I merely waved a hand.  The coyote was then doing a most difficult tremolo high above the clamour.

“Oh, that!” said my enlightened hostess.  “That’s nothing; just a little bunch of calves being weaned.  We never notice that—­and say, they got the groom’s mother in here, too.  Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors—­Mrs. Angus McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation!  I bet they didn’t need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over her person.  They could have took her in a coal cellar.”

“How do you expect to sleep with all that going on?” I insisted.

“All what?  Oh, them calves.  That’s nothing!  Angus says to her when they first got money:  ‘Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!’ He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only afford a few.  Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he says.  What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald?  You’d think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him say it from the heart out.  And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him.  Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria:  ’Once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman!’ Oh, she was hysteric all right!  She was like what I seen about one of the movie actresses, ‘the empress of stormy emotion.’  Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper guff.  And it was a funny blow-up.  I don’t know as I blamed her at the time.”

I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night.  It helped a little.  I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears trained in rejection.  That helped more.  I could hear her now, save in the more passionate intervals of the chorus.

“All right, then.  What was the funny blow-up?” She caught the significance of the closed door and window.

“But that’s music,” she insisted.  “Why, I’d like to have a good record of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I could play it on a phonograph when I’m off visiting—­only it would make me too homesick.”  She glanced at the closed door and window in a way that I found sinister.

“I couldn’t hear you,” I suggested.