Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed.  She did not often laugh.  Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth’s clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,—­the Plebeian’s scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the Aristocrat’s condescending patience with the Plebeian.

It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.  “Never mind about your understanding.  Zillah dear,” she said softly.  “Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!”

Along Zillah Forsyth’s ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show.  With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed towards her half-packed trunk.

“It wasn’t—­Sunday school—­I was coming home from—­when I got my motto!” she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular.  “And, so far as I know,” she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, “the man who inspired my noble life was not in any way—­particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages!” As though her collar was suddenly too tight she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft white throat.  “He was a—­New York doctor!” she hastened somewhat airily to explain.  “Gee!  But he was a swell!  And he was spending his summer holiday up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda fountain.  And he used to drop into the drug-store, nights, after cigars and things.  And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things, sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this and that,—­quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,—­all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing syrup!  Lordy!  He knew ’em as though they were people!  Where they come from!  Where they’re going to!  Yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck!  Jokes about your own town’s soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy!  Gee!  But the things that man had seen and known!  Gee!  But the things that man could make you see and know!  And he had an automobile,” she confided proudly.  “It was one of those billion dollar French cars.  And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store.  But we used to ride home by way of—­New Hampshire!”

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken.  “Gee!  Those nights!” she muttered.  “Rain or shine, moon or thunder,—­tearing down those country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering!  It was him that taught me to do my hair like this—­instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing,” she asserted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance of suspicion towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her sentence again.  “It was he that taught me to do my hair like this,” she repeated with the faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.