and undresses me."

Judith stopped and looked up at him. "Who's Pauline?" she asked,
disapproving astonishment in her accent.

"Madrina's maid."

Judith pursued him further with her little black look of scorn. "Who's
Madrina?"

"Why--you know--your Aunt Victoria--my stepmother--she married my
father when I was a little baby--she doesn't want me to call her
'mother' so I call her Madrina.' That's Italian for--"

Judith had no interest in this phenomenon and no opinion about it.
She recalled the conversation to the point at issue with her usual
ruthless directness. "And you wouldn't know how to undress yourself
if somebody didn't help you!" She went on loosening the laces in a
contemptuous silence, during which the boy glowered resentfully at the
back of her shining black hair. Sylvia essayed a soothing remark
about what pretty shoes he had, but with small success. Already the
excursion was beginning to take on the color of its ending,--an
encounter between the personalities of Judith and Arnold, with Sylvia
and Lawrence left out. When the shoes finally came off, they revealed
white silk half-hose, which, discarded in their turn, showed a pair of
startlingly pale feet, on which the new boy now essayed wincingly to
walk. "Ouch! Ouch! OUCH!" he cried, holding up first one and then the
other from contact with the hot sharp-edged pebbles of the path, "How
do you _do it_?"