discussions, carried on in acrimonious tones which nevertheless seemed
not in the least to impair the good feeling between them. When there
was nobody else there for Father to disagree with, he disagreed with
Mother, occasionally, to his great delight, rousing her from her
customary self-contained economy of words to a heat as voluble as his
own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together,
they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on
some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive
system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when
they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and
stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as
though they had been pursuing each other on foot instead of verbally.

The older habitués of the house were no more peaceable and were
equally given to what seemed to childish listeners endless disputes
about matters of no importance. Professor La Rue's white mustache and
pointed beard quivered with the intensity of his scorn for the modern
school of poetry, and Madame La Rue, who might be supposed to be
insulated by the vast bulk of her rosy flesh from the currents of
passionate conviction flashing through the Marshall house, had fixed
ideas on the Franco-Prussian War, on the relative values of American
and French bed-making, and the correct method of bringing up girls
(she was childless), which needed only to be remotely stirred to burst
into showers of fiery sparks. And old Professor Kennedy was nothing
less than abusive when started on an altercation about one of the
topics vital to him, such as the ignoble idiocy of the leisure-class
ideal, or the generally contemptible nature of modern society. No, it
was not mere difference of opinion which so charged the air during
Aunt Victoria's rare visits with menacing electricity.