“What does one do in Springdale, these glorious spring evenings?”
“One goes to the show, if one has an amiable brother.” To Eileen’s suggestion, Larimore added: “Won’t you come along, Mrs. Ascott? Vaudeville and pictures—not much of an attraction; but it might amuse you. My mother is entertaining the ladies of the missionary society this evening, and she doesn’t want us around.”
“Yes,” Theodora added, “and Mrs. Stevens is coming. She and Eileen don’t speak, since the ‘ossified episode.’ You know, Lady Judith, that’s all that saved you from being invited to join the Self Culture Club. Mamma belongs. She was one of the charter members—reads the magazine, like it was the Bible—and she meant it for a compliment to offer your name for membership. But Mrs. Stevens was so furious at Eileen that she tabled all the names mamma submitted.”
“You wouldn’t have gone in for that rubbish anyway,” Eileen defended herself. “Mrs. Stevens makes me tired. She hasn’t a thing in her library but reference works. And mamma holds her up to Theo and me as a bright example. Tells us that we can’t expect to get culture unless we look things up. Ina Stevens does that, and she has facts hanging all over her. She’s as prissy as her mother.”
“But what was the ‘ossified episode’?” Judith asked, recognizing one of Larimore Trench’s expressions, wherewith Theodora’s speech was frequently adorned.
“Humph, I got caught on the word, in rhetoric class. Thought it meant something about kissing, and the whole class hooted at me. Ina was at home, sick, that day, and Theo and I went over in the evening to take her credit card. Her marks were loads better’n mine, and Mrs. Stevens swelled up so about it that I couldn’t help telling her that my grandfather was expected to die, because all his bones had ossified. And, Mrs. Ascott, both of them—Ina and her mother—fell for it. Mrs. Stevens said it was a dreadful disease, but she had known one old lady who lived three years in that condition. I looked blank as a grindstone; but Theo had to go and snigger. And after we went home, Mrs. Stevens looked it up—and ’phoned mamma that I had to apologize, or she wouldn’t let Ina chum with me any more. I don’t care. I like Kitten Henderson best, any way.”
She turned to look anxiously up the street, as if she were more than half expecting some one, while Judith went into the house to get her hat.
II
The performance had been going on for an hour when the four entered the theatre, groping their way down the dark aisle to a row of unoccupied seats at the left side. The stage was being set for a troupe of Japanese tumblers, and the interval was bridged by news films and an animated cartoon. To Judith this form of entertainment was new. Raoul could tolerate nothing but the sprightliest comedy. With the Ramsays and Herbert Faulkner she had tried to find surcease in grand opera and the symphony. Once in London she and her mother had taken refuge from the rain in a cinema theatre where, on a wide screen, a company of fat French women chased a terrified little man—who had loved not wisely but too often—through the familiar streets of the Latin Quarter, overturning flower stands and vegetable carts, falling in scrambled heaps that writhed with a brave showing of lingerie, untangling themselves and scampering to fresh disaster, when they discovered that the object of their jealous rage had somehow slipped unhurt from the mass. Mrs. Denslow was disgusted. Judith was only bored.
But this bit of screen craft was different. On an expanse of dazzling white a single black dot appeared, paused a breathless moment and went tripping about in a zigzag dance, spilling smaller dots as it went. These resolved themselves into figures that stalked about with the jerky motion of automata. A ghostly hand passed over the picture, and it stood revealed a plenum of regularly arranged dots. With another wave of the wraithlike hand, the dots began to move slowly to and fro, advancing and retreating until they assumed the outlines of a great picture, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Other pictures were produced by means of those same dots. But Mrs. Ascott, who had never before watched the vibrant changes of an animated cartoon, found it necessary to close her eyes to relieve the strain. And then ... some one was leaning over her shoulder, heavy with the odour of a spent cigar, and a full, authoritative voice was saying: