Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/376

 of his face changing with comical suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to go on with his statement to them. It must have been really very fumy indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak, and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.

At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true, as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.

"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by command of a medium. To be master of my tool I must not only be able to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I feel like it or not. And I assure you, young ladies, I do not feel in the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."

The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.

"Well, Miss Mills," he went on, addressing Eugenia, "you cannot get such a control of your medium, you cannot learn to speak any language beautifully, without long, long dull hours of the oh! oh! ah! ah! practice that you scorn. You cannot buy such a command of your medium, not for millions