The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing, insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister’s babble.  In the light of Fulkerson’s history of the family, its origin and its ambition, he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister’s folly and an ignorant will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and their surroundings.  He said to himself that she was deathly proud—­too proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put others under her feet.  Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife’s social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the inexperienced girl’s doubt whether to treat them with much or little respect.  He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and disappointments before her.  Her sister would accept both with a lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly deep.  He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him, in her hoarse voice: 

“I think it’s a shame, some of the pictur’s a body sees in the winders.  They say there’s a law ag’inst them things; and if there is, I don’t understand why the police don’t take up them that paints ’em.  I hear 182 tell, since I been here, that there’s women that goes to have pictur’s took from them that way by men painters.”  The point seemed aimed at March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell with a silencing effect for the moment.  Nobody seemed willing to take it up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman’s severity:  “I say they ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail.  They’d be drummed out of town in Moffitt.”

Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh:  “I should think they would!  And they wouldn’t anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either—­not low neck the way they do here, anyway.”

“And that pack of worthless hussies,” her mother resumed, “that come out on the stage, and begun to kick”

“Laws, mother!” the girl shouted, “I thought you said you had your eyes shut!”

All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.

“Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes.  I don’t know what they’re doin’ in all their churches, to let such things go on,” said the old woman.  “It’s a sin and a shame, I think.  Don’t you, Coonrod?”

A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.

“If it’s going to be company, Coonrod,” said his mother, making an effort to rise, “I reckon I better go up-stairs.”

“It’s Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” said Conrad.  “He thought he might come”; and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to pass through the whole company.  Conrad went to the door himself (the serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in Fulkerson’s cheerful voice before his cheerful person.