But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might have been leaning over a picket fence. "I wouldn't give in to Her!" she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.
Arnold looked nettled. "Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often you could notice it much! Saunders isn't that kind! Saunders is a gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get going!"
It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.
Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: "But it's my belief that
Saunders is beginning to take to dope … bad business! Bad business!
He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some
way."
Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man of the world patting two pretty children on the head.
Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she had begun it. "But you did give in to her! You pretend you didn't because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let _any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!"
Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand. He shifted his feet and said defensively: "Aw, she's a woman. A fellow can't knock her down. I wouldn't let a man do it." He retreated still further, through another phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory: "I'd like to know who you are to talk! You give in to your mother all the time!"
"I don't give in to my mother; I mind her," said Judith, drawing a distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute enough to attack other than by a jeering, "Oh, what a crawl! What's the diff?"
"And I mind her whether she's there or not! I do!" continued Judith, pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her advantage.
Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of luxury resounding about them. "Hush! hush!" she said; "don't be so silly. We ought to be going back."