into a not uncharming baby-talk over an infant of her own.
"Oh, isn't he distinguished!" she repeated, admiring further the sartorial graces, the Byronic collar, extending a half-inch over the lapel, the unpadded, London-cut shoulders. "Oh, why don't you say something? You never get enthusiastic over anything any more, and I must say I like enthusiasm."
The object of the adulation had finished puttering with his car, an operation ostentatiously prolonged over the new model, and was overtaking them.
"Isn't that just perfect?" persisted Stella, pinching the other's arm, and trying to delay her. Now the other youths of Salthaven obediently raised their hats two inches above their heads when addressing "a lady," but young Mr. Huntington always doffed his, and, furthermore, stood uncovered during the whole course of the conversation, no matter what the weather, providing only the lady were not ill-favoured.
"He's just like the men in Robert Chambers's stories, isn't he?" Stella prattled on, with time enough to get in one more blurb, "Look at his hair—that's the sort of hair-cut to have, not the countrified round-cut the other boys get."
Now a moment before Sally had looked most poetic, with none of the old sweetness gone, but the old care-free boyish look a little wistful, and now and then tinged with the heart's-tides. In the caverns of the deep, the pearl as it ripens always adds to its white innocence the auroral flushes of maturity. However, she answered Stella's chatter most unpoetically and rudely,—
