"How about your own self?" Doris asked.
"I cry too, but not all the time. Jean and I are standing shoulder to shoulder with Cousin Roxy." Kit straightened her shoulders and stood in martial attitude. "We represent the--the ultima--what's the farthest beyond in Latin, Jean? Anyway that's what we represent, the beyondness in feminine efficiency."
"What does that mean, Kit?"
Kit patted the short bobbed curls on the head of the youngest "robin."
"Means that we've got to keep our heads no matter what happens."
Jean said little. Ever since she could remember, her mother had said to her, "You know I rely on you most, dear. You're mother's comforter."
It was a thought that always gave her fresh strength, to know how much her mother needed her. She was smaller than Kit, slender and with dark eyes, with a look in them that Doris said reminded her of the eyes of a deer.
"Jeanie, there's a Virginia fallow deer over in the Park that looks exactly like you," she would say soberly. "And so do all the squirrels when they keep still and stare at one sideways. You've got such sympathetic, interested, mellow eyes."
"Eyes can't be mellow, Dorrie," Jean laughed. "Try something else."
"Well, they are mellow just the same,--tender and nice, aren't they, Helen?"