"No respect for God or man," mumbled the judge, meaning that a creature capable of calling him Old Flapdoodle could be expected to ask if Matthew Arnold were worth knowing.
The Wilbur twin here thrust the blue jay upon his father with cordial words. Dave professed to be entranced with the gift. It appeared that he had always longed for a stuffed blue jay. He curled a finger to it and called, "Tweet! Tweet!" a bit of comedy poignantly relished by the donor of the bird.
His father now ceremoniously conducted Mrs. Penniman to what he spoke of as the banqueting hall. He made almost a minuet of their progress. Under one arm he carried his bird to place it on the table, where later during the meal he would convulse the Wilbur twin by affecting to feed it bits of bread. Winona still hungered for details of the day's tragedy, but Dave must talk of other things. He talked far too much, the judge believed. He had just made the invalid uncomfortable by disclosing that the Ajax Invigorator had an alcoholic content of at least fifty-five per cent. He said that for this reason it would afford temporary relief to almost any one. He added that it would be cheap stuff, and harmful, and that if a man wished to drink he ought to go straight to Vielhaber's, where they kept an excellent line of Ajax Invigorators and sold them under their right names. The judge said "Stuff and nonsense" to this, but the ladies believed, for despite his levity Dave Cowan knew things. He read books and saw the world. Only the Wilbur twin still had faith in the invigorator. He had seen the picture. You couldn't get round that picture.
Having made the judge uncomfortable, Dave rendered Winona so by a brief lecture upon organic evolution, with the blue jay as his text. He said it had taken four hundred and fifty million years for man to progress thus far from the blue-jay stage—if you could call it progress, the superiority of man's brain to the jay's being still inconsiderable.
Winona was uncomfortable, because she had never been able to persuade herself that we had come up from the animals, and in any event it was not talk for the ears of innocent children. She was relieved when the speaker strayed into the comparatively blameless field of astronomy, telling of suns so vast that our own sun became to them but a pin point of light, and of other worlds out in space peopled with beings like Mrs. Penniman and Winona and the judge, though even here Winona felt that the lecturer was too daring. The Bible said nothing about these other worlds out in space. But then Dave had once, in the post office, argued against religion itself in the most daring manner, with none other than the Reverend Mallett.
It was not until the meal ended and they were again on the porch in the summer dusk that Winona made any progress in her criminal investigations. There, while Dave Cowan played his guitar and sang sentimental ballads to Mrs. Penniman—these being among the supposed infirmities of the profligate duchess—Winona drew the twins aside and managed to gain a blurred impression of the day's tremendous events. She never did have the thing clearly. The Merle twin was eager to tell too much, the other determined to tell too little. But the affair had plainly been less nefarious than reported by Don Paley to Ed Seaver. The twins persisted in ignoring the social aspects of their adventure. To them it was a thing of pure finance.
Winona had to give it up at last, for Lyman Teaford came with his flute in its black case. Dave Cowan finished "In the Gloaming," brazenly, though it was not thought music by either Lyman or Winona, who would presently dash into the "Poet and Peasant" overture. The twins begged to be let to see Lyman assemble his flute, and Dave overlooked the process with them. Lyman deftly joined the various sections of shining metal.
"He looks like a plumber," said Dave. The twins giggled, but Winona frowned.
"No respect for God or man," mumbled the judge from his wicker chair.