It was funny—but pleasant, too, as a novelty—sitting around a table lit by a queer smelly oil lamp with an engraved globe on it, in a little dining room with a dark brown wallpaper and an unwieldy protruding sideboard which had evidently been picked up at a bargain because it wouldn't fit in anywhere. Mrs. Tracy sat opposite, smiling at Vance wistfully across the teacups, and asking gentle questions about everybody out at Euphoria. She remembered what a pretty little house the Westons had lived in at Advance, when she'd gone there on her honeymoon, and Vance was a baby; and when Vance smiled away her commendation, and said they'd got a much bigger house now at Euphoria, she replied that she supposed his mother'd made it all lovely, and then rambled off to questions about the wonderful Grandma Scrimser and Aunt Saidie Toler. Vance noticed that she remembered a great deal more about all of them than they did about her, and he said to himself that she had what Grandma Scrimser called a Family Bible sort of mind.

Upton dropped into the seat between his mother and Vance, and while the meal was in progress a thin fair girl in a pale blue blouse and a very short skirt wandered into the room, shook hands awkwardly with the newcomer, and seated herself in the remaining chair.

"Laura Lou's always late—aren't you?" Mrs. Tracy said, in her tone of smiling acceptance. "I presume your sisters aren't always on time for meals, are they, Vance?"

Vance laughed, and said no, they drove his mother wild sometimes, and Laura Lou laughed too, but without looking at him, though his one glimpse of her heavy-lidded gray eyes with thick dark lashes made him desirous of another. Her face, however, was not pretty; too drawn and thin, like her brother's, and with rather high cheekbones which Vance thought ugly, and ash blonde hair flopping untidily over her forehead. She was not more than fifteen, he conjectured, an age essentially uninteresting to him; and as she refused to talk, and drooped her head sheepishly over her plate of cold meat and potatoes (which he saw she hardly touched), Vance's attention soon wandered from her. He had reached the stage of fatigue when everything about one is at once exciting and oppressive, and in spite of his friendly feeling toward his hosts he longed desperately for solitude and sleep.

But sleep was after all impossible. It was not the musty shut-up smell of his queer little room, nor the surprise of being unable to have a hot bath after his long cindery journey (the Tracy water supply being as primitive as their lighting and their means of locomotion); what kept him awake was something stronger even than youth's exhaustless faculty of self-repair, of sleeping through, and in spite of, any number of anxieties and discomforts—a burning inward excitement shadowed but not overcome by his sense of vague disappointment.