Mark appeared just then and she began to laugh helplessly.  His hands were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little face was appallingly streaked and black.

Paul did not laugh.  He said in horrified reproach, “Oh, Mark!  You never touched your face!  It’s piggy dirty.”

Mark was staggered for a moment, but nothing staggered him long.  “I don’t get microbes off my face into my food,” he said calmly.  “And you bet there aren’t any microbes left on my hands.”  He went on, looking at the table disapprovingly, “Mother, there isn’t a many on the table this day, and I wanted a many.”

“The stew’s awful good,” said Paul, putting away a large quantity.

“‘Very,’ not ‘awful,’ and don’t hold your fork like that,” corrected Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the insipid phrase “very good” nor did she consider the way a fork was held so very essential to salvation.  “How much of life is convention, any way you arrange it,” she thought, “even in such an entirely unconventional one as ours.”

“It is good,” said Mark, taking his first mouthful.  Evidently he had not taken the remarks about his face at all seriously.

“See here, Mark,” his mother put it to him as man to man, “do you think you ought to sit down to the table looking like that?”

Mark wriggled, took another mouthful, and got up mournfully.

Paul was touched.  “Here, I’ll go up with you and get it over quick,” he said.  Marise gave him a quick approving glance.  That was the best side of Paul.  You could say what you pleased about the faults of American and French family life, but at any rate the children didn’t hate each other, as English children seemed to, in novels at least.  It was only last week that Paul had fought the big French Canadian boy in his room at school, because he had made fun of Elly’s rubber boots.

As the little boys clattered out she said to the two guests, “I don’t know whether you’re used to children.  If you’re not, you must be feeling as though you were taking lunch in a boiler factory.”

Mr. Welles answered, “I never knew what I was missing before.  Especially Paul.  That first evening when you sent him over with the cake, as he stood in the door, I thought, ’I wish I could have had a little son like that!’”

“We’ll share him with you, Mr. Welles.”  Marise was touched by the wistfulness of his tone.  She noticed that Mr. Marsh had made no comment on the children.  He was perhaps one of the people who never looked at them, unless they ran into him.  Eugenia Mills was like that, quite sincerely.

“May I have a little more of the blanquette, if I won’t be considered a glutton?” asked Mr. Marsh now.  “I’ve sent to the city for an invaluable factotum of mine to come and look out for us here, and when he comes, I hope you’ll give him the recipe.”

The little boys clattered back and began to eat again, in haste with frequent demands for their mother to tell them what time it was.  In spite of this precaution, the clock advanced so relentlessly that they were obliged to set off, the three of them, before dessert was eaten, with an apple in one hand and a cookie in the other.