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a half-indifferent impudence.
    “Bring my luggage right in here, Quinn! Didn’t you say your name was Quinn?” she ordered imperiously. “I want to show Dad some things I’ve brought. Bring them in here , I said! Didn’t you hear me?”
    The old servant hovered anxiously nearby, a pallor in his humble, intelligent face, a troubled eye on his master’s form in the dim shadow of the book-lined room. He turned a deprecatory glance on Anne Truesdale, as he entered with two bags, a shiny suitcase, a hat box, a tennis racket, and a bag of golf clubs, looking for an unobtrusive corner in which to deposit them and thereby stop the noisy young tongue that seemed to him to be committing irretrievable indignities to the very atmosphere of the beloved old house.
    “Take them out, Joe,” said Anne Truesdale in her quiet voice of command.
    “No, you shan’t take them out!” screamed Athalie, stamping her heavy young foot indignantly. “I want them here! Put them right down there! She has nothing to say about it!”
    Joe vacillated from the library to the hall and back again uncertainly and looked pitifully toward his master.
    “Put the things in the hall, Joe, and then go out and shut the door!” ordered the master with something in his controlled voice that caused his daughter to look at him with surprise. Joe obeyed, Anne Truesdale thankfully disappeared, and Patterson Greeves found himself in the library alone with his child.
    Athalie faced him with a storm in her face.
    “I think you are a perfectly horrid old thing!” she declared hysterically with a look in her eyes that at once reminded him of her mother. “I said I wanted those things in here, and I’m going to have them! I guess they are my things, aren’t they?” She faced him a second defiantly and then opened the door swiftly, causing a scuttling sound in the back hall near the kitchen entrance. Vehemently she recovered her property, banging each piece down with unnecessary force and slamming the door shut with a comical grimace of triumph toward the departed servants.
    “Now, we’re ready to talk!” she declared, with suddenly returning good humor, as she dropped to the edge of a large leather chair and faced her father again.
    Patterson Greeves was terribly shaken and furiously angry, yet he realized fully that he had the worst of the argument with this child as he had nearly always had with her mother, and he felt the utter futility of attempting further discipline until he had a better grasp of the situation. As he sat in his uncle’s comfortable leather chair, entrenched as it were in this fine old dignified castle, it seemed absurd that a mere child could overthrow him, could so put his courage to flight and torment his quiet world. He turned his attention upon her as he might have turned it upon some new specimen of viper that had crossed his path and become annoying; and once having looked, he stared and studied her again.
    There was no denying that Athalie Greeves was pretty so far as the modern world counts prettiness. Some of the girls in her set called her “simply stunning,” and the young men of her age called her a “winner.” She was fair and fat and fourteen with handsome teeth and large, bold, dark eyes. But the lips around the teeth were too red and the lashes around the eyes overladen. Her fairness had been accentuated to the point of ghastliness, with a hectic point in each cheek that gave her the appearance of an amateur pastel portrait.
    She wore a cloth suit of bright tan, absurdly short and narrow for her size. A dashing little jade-green suede hat beaded in black and white sat jauntily on a bushy head of bobbed and extraordinarily electrified black hair, and whatever kind of eyebrows she had possessed had been effectually plucked and obliterated, their substitutes being so finely penciled and so far up under the overshadowing hat brim as to be practically out of the running. She wore flesh-colored silk stockings and tall,