“Only twenty-nine,” she told me gravely, “Gerald and me....”
“Oh,” I said. What could one say?
“Bad luck, I do think,” she murmured. I wondered, you know, whom she was talking to. Certainly not to me.
“He’s a very good fellow,” I said.
“Heredity, you see,” she suddenly explained. “Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of pneumonia.”
Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew very uncomfortable. What was she thinking about? She was staring down at the sprawling thing that was her twin brother, the emerald still livid against his arm.
“He wrote a very good book once,” I said, to say something.
“Yes. About Boy....”
“Boy?” Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically; it meant nothing.
“Didn’t you know?” She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I knew nothing at all about Gerald.