The quaint old story held the girl’s absorbed attention to the end. She wished it were longer, and told her grandfather so after breakfast, adding that the way he read the Old Testament made it more interesting than common.
He received the compliment with complacence. “Well,” he said, “I guess I do read it better than some folks. I guess I’m a little like those men in the days of Ezra the scribe, who stood up before the people, and ‘read in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand.’”
Kate privately wondered how many more people in the Bible her grandfather resembled, but she refrained from suggesting the query, lest he should claim her attention at once for the whole list.
It was while they sat at table that morning that he said, looking at her with the sudden lighting of face which marks a mental discovery: “It’s your great-aunt Katharine that you put me in mind of. I knew there was somebody. It ain’t your looks so much; but a way you have.”
“Oh, grandfather, how can you?” cried Stella. “Kate, you won’t thank him much for that when you know Aunt Katharine.”
“She’s the one I was named for, I suppose,” said Kate. “I’ve heard mother tell about her. Well, if she’s disagreeable, there won’t be any love lost between us on account of the name. I never did like it particularly.”
“Disagreeable!” cried Stella, “why, she’s the queerest, most cross-grained, cantankerous—”
“Stella! Stella!” said her mother, severely. “Why will you prejudice your cousins against your poor Aunt Katharine?”
“My poor Aunt Katharine will do it herself quick enough,” said Stella. “Oh, yes,” she added with a little shrug, as she saw her mother’s lips parting again, “my mother’s going to tell you that Aunt Katharine has had a great deal in her life to try her, and that she is really a remarkably bright and capable woman. It’s perfectly true; and several other things are true besides.”
“The trouble with my sister Katharine,” said Ruel Saxon, setting down his cup of tea, which he had been drinking so hot that every swallow was accompanied by an upward jerk of the head and a facial contortion, “the trouble with Katharine Saxon don’t lay in her nat’ral faculties. It lays in a stiff-necked and perverse disposition. When she gets a notion into her head she won’t change it for anybody, and she’s wiser in her own conceit than ‘seven men that can render a reason.’”