Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/335

 in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.

Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.

With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The dominant line of the composition I saw to be—

I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.

"I can't think," she began, "where the boy learned such things!"

I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circumstances.

"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted.