“‘Aren’t you a silly!’ said Lilith, laughing in Spoon-billish derision. Lilith was twelve, and one knows vastly more at twelve than at nine. ‘Virtues aren’t anything. And as for Roland’s—that doesn’t mean that he left them with us, any more than that he took them with him.’
“‘Then what does it mean?’ said Delilah. ‘I’ve thought so much about it.’
“‘You’ll have to think some more,’ said Lilith—‘a good deal more, I should say—of your kind of thinking!’
“Delilah did not often appeal to her sister in these matters. She did not enjoy Lilith’s habit of laughing. In truth, she didn’t enjoy being laughed at at all—not the least in the world. She was like a great many other people.
“And so was Lilith.
“But oh, there were many things that Delilah wished to know!
“The Spoon-bill family was, as I have said, well born but poorly bred. Maren Spoon-bill and Oliver W. Spoon-bill both came of very good stock, but they had been the black sheep of their families and had forgotten the traditions and customs of their race. ‘They had left no more pride,’ Maren Spoon-bill’s mother once said, ‘than a sand-hill crane—no, nor a duck.’
“‘No, nor a duck,’ echoed Maren Spoon-bill and her husband, and gloried in it.
“And the children ran wild.