“Aren’t you late, Freda?”

“I went to the movies.”

“Again? I wish you wouldn’t go so often. What do you get out of them?”

“Thrills, father dear.”

“All unreal.”

She skipped into a stride that matched his.

“A thrill is a shiver of romance,” she declared, “it’s never unreal.”

“And what gives the shiver? The white sheet?”

“I’m open minded. Could be a well tailored garden, Nazimova’s gown, a murder on a mountain.”

He laughed and they went along briskly until they came to the third in a row of small yellow frame houses, and turned in at the scrap of cement walk which led up to the porch.