“But I will not have anybody use the word ‘stunt’ in my house,” she whispered to Miss Sherwin.

“That’s good.  I tell you:  why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?”

“Raymie?  Why, my dear, he’s the most sentimental yearner in town!”

“See here, child!  Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten!  Raymie does wag his tail.  But the poor dear——­Longing for what he calls ‘self-expression’ and no training in anything except selling shoes.  But he can sing.  And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock’s patronage and ridicule, he’ll do something fine.”

Carol apologized for her superciliousness.  She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of “stunts,” “We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon.  You’re the only famous actor I’m going to let appear on the stage tonight.”

While Raymie blushed and admitted, “Oh, they don’t want to hear me,” he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest.

In her affection for Raymie’s defender, in her desire to “discover artistic talent,” Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.

Raymie sang “Fly as a Bird,” “Thou Art My Dove,” and “When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest,” all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.

Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an “elocutionist” being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.  She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie’s half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour.  She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful.

At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, “My!  That was sweet!  Of course Raymond hasn’t an unusually good voice, but don’t you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?”

Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality:  “Oh yes, I do think he has so much feeling!”

She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused.  She cried, “Now we’re going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago.  You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter!  After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades.”

Much attention and incredulity.  A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott’s bride was noisy and improper.

“I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as the shepherds.  The rest of you are wolves.  Your shoes are the sheep.  The wolves go out into the hall.  The shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds—­who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black-jacks.  The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall.  No one excused!  Come on!  Shoes off!”