This was Jane.  In one hand she held a little stack of sugar-sprinkled wafers, which she slowly but steadily depleted, unconscious of the increasingly earnest protest, at last nearing agony, in the eyes of Clematis.  Wearing unaccustomed garments of fashion and festivity, Jane stood, in speckless, starchy white and a blue sash, watching the lawn-mower spout showers of grass as the powerful Genesis easily propelled it along over lapping lanes, back and forth, across the yard.

From a height of illimitable loftiness the owner of the cardboard treasury looked down upon the squat commonplaceness of those three lives.  The condition of Jane and Genesis and Clematis seemed almost laughably pitiable to him, the more so because they were unaware of it.  They breathed not the starry air that William breathed, but what did it matter to them?  The wretched things did not even know that they meant nothing to Miss Pratt!

Clematis found his ear too pliable for any great solace from his foot, but he was not disappointed; he had expected little, and his thoughts were elsewhere.  Rising, he permitted his nose to follow his troubled eyes, with the result that it touched the rim of the last wafer in Jane’s external possession.

This incident annoyed William.  “Look there!” he called from the window.  “You mean to eat that cake after the dog’s had his face on it?”

Jane remained placid.  “It wasn’t his face.”

“Well, if it wasn’t his face, I’d like to know what—­”

“It wasn’t his face,” Jane repeated.  “It was his nose.  It wasn’t all of his nose touched it, either.  It was only a little outside piece of his nose.”

“Well, are you going to eat that cake, I ask you?”

Jane broke off a small bit of the wafer.  She gave the bit to Clematis and slowly ate what remained, continuing to watch Genesis and apparently unconscious of the scorching gaze from the window.

“I never saw anything as disgusting as long as I’ve lived!” William announced.  “I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed it if anybody’d told me a sister of mine would eat after—­”

“I didn’t,” said Jane.  “I like Clematis, anyway.”

“Ye gods!” her brother cried.  “Do you think that makes it any better?  And, by the way,” he continued, in a tone of even greater severity, “I’d a like to know where you got those cakes.  Where’d you get ’em, I’d just like to inquire?”

“In the pantry.”  Jane turned and moved toward the house.  “I’m goin’ in for some more, now.”

William uttered a cry; these little cakes were sacred.  His mother, growing curious to meet a visiting lady of whom (so to speak) she had heard much and thought more, had asked May Parcher to bring her guest for iced tea, that afternoon.  A few others of congenial age had been invited:  there was to be a small matinee, in fact, for the honor and pleasure of the son of the house, and the cakes of Jane’s onslaught were part of Mrs. Baxter’s preparations.  There was no telling where Jane would stop; it was conceivable that Miss Pratt herself might go waferless.