The Happy Average. Brand Whitlock

said the judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the bench.

      “No, that’s so,” assented Mrs. Blair. “But she’s always cheerful and bright.”

      “Is she gloomy?”

      “No, I wouldn’t exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied—rather wistful I should say, yes—wistful.” She seemed pleased to have found the right word.

      “Oh, she’s all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I presume there was dancing.”

      “Yes.”

      “I don’t know that we should let her go out that way.” The judge took off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other about in the Chenowiths’ yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that they would get into Mrs. Chenowith’s flower beds.

      “You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us,” argued Mrs. Blair.

      “No, I suppose not. But then—that was different.”

      Mrs. Blair laughed lightly, and the laugh served to dissipate their cares. She went to the edge of the veranda and pulled a few leaves from the climbing rose-vine that grew there, and the judge put on his glasses and spread out his paper.

      “I’ll take her out for a drive this afternoon,” said Mrs. Blair, turning to go indoors.

      “She’ll be all right,” said the judge, already deep in the political columns.

      That night at supper, the judge looked at Lavinia closely, and after a while he said:

      “You’re not eating, Lavinia. Don’t you feel well?”

      Lavinia turned to her father and smiled.

      “Oh, I’m all right.”

      Her smile perplexed the judge.

      “You look pale,” he said.

      Mrs. Blair glanced warningly at him the length of the table.

      “My girl’s losing her color,” he forged ahead.

      Lavinia dropped her eyelids, and a look of pain appeared in her face, causing it to grow paler.

      “Please don’t worry about me, papa,” she said.

      Mrs. Blair divined Lavinia’s dislike of this personal discussion. She tried to catch her husband’s eye again, but he was looking at Lavinia narrowly through his glasses.

      “Did you go riding this afternoon?” he asked as if he were examining a witness whom counsel had not drawn out properly.

      “Yes,” Mrs. Blair hastened to say. “We drove out the Ludlow a long way.”

      “She was riding last night, too,” said Connie.

      “Who with?” demanded Chad, turning to Connie with the challenge he always had ready for her.

      “Who with?” retorted Connie. “Why, Glenn Marley, of course. Who else?”

      “Well, what of it?” demanded Chad. “What’s it to you?”

      “Oh, children, children!” protested Mrs. Blair, wearily. “Do give us a little peace!”

      “Well, she began it,” said Chad.

      Connie was eating savagely, but she whirled on Chad, speaking with difficulty because her mouth was filled with food:

      “You shut up, will you?”

      Chad laughed with a contempt almost theatrical, waved his hand lightly and said:

      “Run away, little girl, run away.”

      Mrs. Blair asked the judge why he did not correct his children, and though the sigh he gave expressed the hopelessness, as it seemed to him, of bringing the two younger members of his train into anything like decorous behavior, he laid his knife and fork in his plate.

      “This must cease,” he said. “It is scandalous. One might conclude that you were the children of some family in Lighttown.”

      “It is very trying,” said Mrs. Blair, acquiescing in her husband’s reproof. “They are just like fire and tow.” She said this quite impersonally and then turned to Connie: “If you can’t behave yourself, I’ll have to send you from the table.”

      “That’s it!” wailed Connie. “That’s it! Blame everything on to me!”

      Mrs. Blair looked severely at her, and Connie’s face reddened. She glanced angrily at her mother and began again:

      “Well, I—”

      The judge rapped the table smartly with his knuckles.

      “Now I want this stopped!” he said. “And right away. If it isn’t I’ll—” He was about to say if it wasn’t he would clear the room, as he was fond of saying whenever the idle spectators in his court showed signs of being human, but he did not finish his sentence. Chad was subdued and decorous, and Connie drooped her head, and began to gulp her food. Her eyes were filling with tears and the tears began to fall, slowly, one by one, splashing heavily into her plate.

      Lavinia was trembling; she tried to control herself, tried to lift her glass, but when she did, her hand shook so that the water was likely to spill. This completed the undoing of her nerves, her eyes suddenly flooded with tears, and she snatched her handkerchief from her lap, rose precipitately, and hurried from the room, dropping her napkin as she went. They heard her going up the stairs, and presently the door of her room closed.

      Connie had followed Lavinia with her misty eyes as she left the table and now she too prepared to leave. She felt a sudden pity springing from her great love of her older sister, and her great pride in her, and she felt a contrition, though she tried to convict Chad, as the latest object of her fiery and erratic temper, by glowering at him.

      “I’ll go to her,” she said, “I can comfort her!”

      “No, stay where you are,” said her mother. “Just leave her alone.”

      The evening light of the summer day flooded into the dining-room; outside a robin was singing. In the room there was constraint and heavy silence, broken only by the slight clatter of the silver or the china. But after a while the judge spoke:

      “Did Lavinia go to the picnic with young Marley?” he asked. He regretted instantly that he had revived the topic that had given rise to the difficulty, but as it lay on the minds of all, it was impossible, just then, to escape its influence.

      “I believe so,” said Mrs. Blair. “He really seems like a nice young man.”

      The judge scowled.

      “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s in the office of Wade Powell—I suppose he is the one, isn’t he?” He thought it unbecoming that a judge should show an intimate knowledge of the relations of young men who were merely studying law.

      “Yes, sir,” said Chad, maintaining his own dignity.

      “Everybody seems to speak well of him,” said Mrs. Blair.

      “But I can’t quite reconcile that with his selecting Wade Powell as a preceptor. I would hardly consider his influence the best in the world, and I would imagine that Doctor Marley would hold to the same opinion.”

      Judge Blair spoke with a certain disappointment in Doctor Marley. He had gone to hear him preach once or twice, and found, as he said, an intellectual quality in his utterances that he missed in the sermons Mr. Hill had been preaching for twenty years in the Presbyterian church.

      “Perhaps he doesn’t know Wade Powell,” said Mrs. Blair. “Doctor Marley is comparatively a stranger here, you know.”

      “Yes, I presume that explains it. But—” he shook his head. He could not forgive any one who showed respect for Wade Powell. “Powell has little business except a certain criminal practice, and now and then a personal injury case.”

      “Is there anything wrong in personal injury