Then, with white stockings and shoes and gloves--or perhaps
pearl-gray would be better. Yes, with low-cut suede shoes, fastening
with two big smoked-pearl buttons." She looked down with pitying eyes
at Sylvia's sturdy, heavy-soled shoes which could not conceal the
slender, shapely feet within them--"but, what on earth was the child
saying?--"
"--every Sunday evening--it's beautiful, and now I'm getting so big I
can help some. I can turn over the pages for them in hard places,
and when old Mr. Reinhardt has had too much to drink and his hands
tremble, he lets me unfasten his violin-case and tighten up his bow
and--"
Mrs. Hubert cried out, "Your parents don't let you have anything to do
with that old, drunken Reinhardt!"
Sylvia was smitten into silence by the other's horrified tone and
hung her head miserably, only murmuring, after a pause, in damning
extenuation, "He's never so _very_ drunk!"
"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced,
emphatic phrase of condemnation. To her sister she added, "It's really
not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life." One of
her daughters, a child about Sylvia's age, turned a candid, blank
little face up to hers, "Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?" she
asked in a thin little pipe.
Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark
mystery: "Never mind, darling, don't think about it.
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