“Goodness gracious!” ejaculated her aunt.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, ... nothing....”
“Oh, tell me please, Aunt Jan!—Please tell me!”
“Don’t be foolish! I knew his father, that’s all, and I once saw your ‘high-roller’ in his crib when he was less than a year old.... Isn’t he rather expressionless and flat-headed?”
“No; I think he’s perfectly stunning. He wears the best-looking clothes and he’s an awful sport!”
“Well, you’d never expect it, if you’d known his father,” her aunt said dryly.
There was an ascending tramp of feet on the stairs, and Roy with his eldest son appeared, dishevelled and sooty.
“That was a dirty job, all right,” declared Roy after he had greeted his sister-in-law and kissed her with the tips of his lips for fear of contaminating her. “I don’t think she’s been cleaned for years. We shovelled out a ton of soot. Ralph did all the hard work.”
He seemed a little ridiculous, a little pathetic to Jeannette, as he stood before her with his smirched and blackened face, and his tight, wan smile, the upper lip drawn taut across his row of even teeth. His stuck-up hair was still unruly, and had begun to recede at the temples and to thin on top; his face was lined with tiny wrinkles and he wore spectacles with bifocal lenses and metal rims,—an insignificant man, industrious, conscientious, weighed down with the cares and responsibilities of a large family. Life had dealt harshly with him, and somehow, remembering the boy with the whimsical smile who had once made such earnest love to herself in the flush of youth, Jeannette could not but regard the result as tragic. She was fond of Roy, nevertheless; he was always amiable, always good-tempered and cheerful, but she wondered at this moment as she took stock of him what sort of a man he would have become if she, and not Alice, had married him. Different, no doubt, for she would have pushed him into material success; she would not have been as easy-going with him as Alice; he had wanted to write; well, if she had been his wife, he would probably have turned out to be a very successful author for he had ability.