"He said when I asked him that we might call him Hans Lieder, but I'm certain that's not a real name," said Happie.
"Do you know what I believe?" asked Laura standing on tiptoe to whisper so that Happie and Ralph, but not the crowd around them might hear her. "I believe he is the spirit of Chopin come back in another body."
She fell back triumphantly to observe the effect of her words, but it was not what she had intended it to be. Happie and Ralph shouted out in girl and boy fashion. Laura lost her balance as she dropped back and down from her toe tips, the car stopping, lurched forward, and she took an unsentimental header straight into a big man who was reading stock market reports, and whose face turned as angry as the maddest of the Wall Street bulls, while his coat felt to Laura as shaggy and rough as the coat of the grizzliest bear.
"Don't stop to apologize; this is our station," said Ralph, taking the bewildered and mortified Laura by the arm and pushing her towards the door through the crowd that blocked their way.
It was the rule in the Patty-Pans that after dinner there were to be lessons every night except Sunday and on festivals. It was an undecided question as to whether family birthdays were to be reckoned festivals or not. The trouble was there were so many that celebrating all of them cut off a good many nights from study for children who were limited to night for their lessons. Mrs. Scollard was her children's teacher. The eldest three had been to school very little, Laura less, and Polly and Penny not at all. Mrs. Scollard hoped by another year to send Laura for the beginning of a musical education, that should include general study, and to launch Polly on the sea of school life.
There had never been a choice as to methods of education in Margery and Happie's case; the loss of fortune that had made the mother the support of the family, had forced the two elder girls early to take up the office of housekeepers who could not be at school.
Mrs. Scollard felt safer to have the younger ones at home with their sisters while she was away than to let them go to school. So the Scollards were homeeducated by the teaching of a mother qualified beyond most women for her task.
When a birthday came around it was always a question whether it warranted the omission of lessons or not. Happie looked imploringly at her mother after dinner and said insinuatingly: "Polly was never ten years old until to-night, motherums! Don't you think we might mark the occasion by dropping all other lessons and taking up chemistry, demonstrating how heat changes butter, chocolate, milk and sugar into fudge?"
Mrs. Scollard hesitated and was lost. Penny leaped on her lap to hug her for a consent which she read in her mother's eyes, and Polly cried in a staid sort of rapture: "This will make my birthday perfect—dancing school and fudge!"
Flats are an invention for which to be grateful. Without them how would homes be possible to people with little strength, less income and no space? But they have their drawbacks, like everything else in an imperfect world, and not least of these is the way sounds and odors wander from one end of them to the other, owing to the arrangement which Happie had called "the Patty-Pan style of architecture." No one can safely talk secrets in a flat, and no one can brew secret potions, for good intent or ill, in the most distant end of their elongated connections.