"That's the measure they dance to, the new generation. Doesn't it get into your torpid blood, Bob? Don't you wish you were young again? To be a desperado of twenty! They're all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys. Even Connie with her eyes of a vestal. Ah!"
A new note had merged with the music, a hoarse, childish croon, following the mad measure with an interwoven recitative.
"That's Patricia. She's dancing to it."
"How can you tell?" asked the physician.
"By the way she's singing. Little devil! I wonder what it'll be like by the time she's grown up," mused the mother.
"Which won't be so long, now."
"So it won't. I keep forgetting that. She seems such a baby. What a queer little creature it is, Bob!"
"She's a terror. But there's something lovable about her, too. A touch of you in her, Mona."
"Of me? She's no more like me than I'm like my namesake of the well-known Lisa family. Nor like the older girls, either. Well, why shouldn't she be different from them? Coming five years after I'd supposed all that sort of thing was over. She was pure accident. How I tried to get out of having her! Perhaps that's why she's such a strange little elf. But Ralph's crazy about her—as much as he can be crazy about anything. I thought for a time she'd bring us together again."
"But you found variety more amusing than pure domesticity," suggested the physician.