She tossed her head again.  “Pooh!  They’d all of ’em just say:  ’Good ribbons to bad rubbish,’ I guess!” However, she seemed far from despondent about this; in fact, she was naturally pleased with her position as a young girl saved from the power of ruffians by a rescuer who was her Very Ideal.  “I bet if I died, they wouldn’t even have a funeral,” she said cheerfully.  “They’d proba’ly just leave me lay.”

The curiosities of the human mind are found not in high adventure:  they are everywhere in the commonplace.  Never for a moment did it strike Noble Dill that Florence’s turn to the morbid bore any resemblance to his recent visions of his own funeral.  He failed to perceive that the two phenomena were produced out of the same laboratory jar and were probably largely chemical, at that.

“Why, Florence!” he exclaimed.  “That’s a dreadful way to feel.  I’m sure your—­your Aunt Julia loves you.”

“Oh, well,” Florence returned lightly;—­“maybe she does.  I don’t care whether she does or not.”  And now she made a deduction, the profundity of which his condition made him unable to perceive.  “It makes less difference to anybody whether their aunts love ’em or not than whether pretty near anybody else at all does.”

“But not your Aunt Julia” he urged.  “Your Aunt Julia——­”

“I don’t care whether she does than any other aunt I got,” said Florence.  “All of ’em’s just aunts, and that’s all there is to it.”

“But, Florence, your Aunt Julia——­”

“She’s nothin’ in the world but my aunt,” Florence insisted, and her emphasis showed that she was trying hard to make him understand.  “She’s just the same as all of ’em.  I don’t get anything more from her than I do from any the rest of ’em.”

Her auditor was dumfounded, but not by Florence’s morals.  The cold-blooded calculation upon which her family affections seemed to be founded, this aboriginal straightforwardness of hers, passed over him.  What shocked him was her appearing to see Julia as all of a piece with a general lot of ordinary aunts.  Helplessly, he muttered again: 

“But your Aunt Julia——­”

“There she is now,” said Florence, pointing to the window nearest them.  “They’ve stopped dancing for a while so’s that ole Mister Clairdyce can get a chance to sing somep’n.  Mamma told me he was goin’ to.”

Dashing chords sounded from a piano invisible to Noble and his companion; the windows exhibited groups of deferentially expectant young people; and then a powerful barytone began a love song.  From the yard the singer could not be seen, but Julia could be:  she stood in the demurest attitude; and no one needed to behold the vocalist to know that the scoundrel was looking pointedly and romantically at her.

    “Dee-urra-face that holds soswee tasmile for me,
    Wairyew nah tmine how darrrk the worrrl dwooed be!”

To Noble, suffering at every pore, this was less a song than a bellowing; and in truth the confident Mr. Clairdyce did “let his voice out,” for he was seldom more exhilarated than when he shook the ceiling.  The volume of sound he released upon his climaxes was impressive, and the way he slid up to them had a great effect, not indoors alone, but upon Florence, enraptured out under the trees.