“She did not behave like one as far as I was concerned,” Dan remarked with boyish candor. “She was very sweet to me while my eyes were wrong, but afterwards she put me in my place, I can assure you. She was in the same house with me, and seeing me all the time, but she never willingly talked to me. She was discreet almost to the point of primness.”
The entrance of Isabel put a stop to the conversation at this point.
“At last I am free!” laughed Isabel. “Oh, but it has been difficult to correct those books! Aunt Lizzie has been wrapping up all our poor little show of silver in white tissue paper, and she got a big lens to examine each article to see if Mary Ann had scratched it, and every now and then she would say: ‘Look at this, Isabel! Isn’t this a scratch?’”
Dan pushed his sister down into a comfortable wicker chair, telling her that she was now in the land of liberty, where glorious untidiness reigned supreme.
Isabel glanced round with bright, merry eyes.
“This is the other extreme. Don’t you think so, Colonel Lane? Here a little of Aunt Lizzie’s law and order would not come amiss.”
“Wouldn’t it?” cried Dan. “No serpent of ungodly tidiness shall enter my paradise!”
“I think the studio looks tidy enough,” commented Colonel Lane baldly. (He was thinking of Phyllis and this new intolerable complication.)
“But you are a man, you see!” Isabel reminded him. “Look at that packing-case on a chair; that heap of paper on the floor; that open chest with its bulging contents—and cigar ash everywhere.”
“I am happy. That is the main point,” asserted Dan. “And sometimes I have a grand clear-up!”