“He's an awful interestin' talker,” she confided to Emily. “Every time he comes into this kitchen I have to watch out or he'll stay and talk till noontime. And yet if I want to get him to do somethin' or other he is always chock full of business that can't wait a minute. I like to hear him talk—he's got ideas on 'most every kind of thing—but I have to work, myself.”
“Do you mean that he doesn't work?” asked Emily.
“I don't know whether he does or not. I can't make out. If he don't he's an awful good make-believe, that's all I've got to say. One time I caught him back of the woodpile sound asleep, but he was hanging onto the axe just the same. Said he set up half the night before worryin' for fear he mightn't be able to get through his next day's work, and the want of rest had been too much for him. Then he started in to tell me about his home life and I listened for ten minutes before I come to enough to get back to the house.”
“Do you think he is lazy, Imogene?”
“I don't know. He says he never had no chance and it might be that's so. He says the ambition's been pretty well drove out of him, and I guess it has. I should think 'twould be. The way that sister of his nags at him all the time is enough to drive out the—the measles.”
Imogene and Hannah Parker, as Captain Obed said, “rubbed each other the wrong way.” Hannah was continually calling to see her brother, probably to make sure that he was there and not in the dangerous Larkin neighborhood. Imogene resented these visits—“usin' up Mrs. Thankful's time,” she said they were—and she and Hannah had some amusing clashes. Miss Parker was inclined to patronize the girl from the Orphan's Home, and Imogene objected.
“Well,” observed Hannah, on one occasion, “I presume likely you find it nice to be down here, where folks are folks and not just 'inmates.' It must be dreadful to be an 'inmate.'”
Imogene sniffed. “There's all kinds of inmates,” she said, “same as there's all kinds of folks. Far's that goes, there's some folks couldn't be an inmate, if they wanted to. They wouldn't be let in.”
“Oh, is that so? Judgin' by what I've seen I shouldn't have thought them that run such places was very particular. Where's Kenelm?”
“I don't know. He's to work, I suppose. That's what he's hired for, they tell me.”