"See here, Dill!"
"Well, what you want, Sanders?"
"You try to talk about things you understand," said Newland. "You better keep your mind on collecting four dollars a week from some poor coloured widow, and don't——"
"I'd rather keep my mind on that!" Noble was inspired to retort. "Your Aunt Georgina told my mother that ever since you began thinkin' you could write poetry the life your family led was just——"
Newland interrupted. He knew the improper thing his Aunt Georgina had said, and he was again, and doubly, infuriated by the prospect of its repetition here. He began fiercely:
"Dill, you see here——"
"Your Aunt Georgina said——"
Both voices had risen. Plainly it was time for someone to say: "Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Julia glanced anxiously through the darkness of the room beyond the open window beside her, to where the light of the library lamp shone upon a door ajar; and she was the more nervous because Noble, to give the effect of coolness, had lit an Orduma cigarette.
She laughed amiably, as if the two young gentlemen were as amiable as she. "I've thought of something," she said. "Let's take the settee and some chairs down on the lawn where we can sit and see the moon."
"There isn't any," Noble remarked vacantly.