“To my notion,” observed Corthell, “the watercolor that pretends to be anything more than a sketch oversteps its intended limits. The elaborated watercolor, I contend, must be judged by the same standards as an oil painting. And if that is so, why not have the oil painting at once?”

“And with all that, if you please, not an egg on the place for breakfast,” declared the Gretry girl in her thin voice. She was constrained, embarrassed. Of all those present she was the only one to mistake the character of the gathering and appear in formal costume. But one forgave Isabel Gretry such lapses as these. Invariably she did the wrong thing; invariably she was out of place in the matter of inadvertent speech, an awkward accident, the wrong toilet. For all her nineteen years, she yet remained the hoyden, young, undeveloped, and clumsy.

“Never an egg, and three thousand hens in the runs,” she continued. “Think of that! The Plymouth Rocks had the pip. And the others, my lands! I don’t know. They just didn’t lay.”