The other occupant of the room, his sister, was watching him with an expression half amused, half sad. They were much alike, both sandy in coloring, and both wearing the same humorous, half-quizzical smile, which in her was saddened by the loss her deep mourning indicated. She had never been a handsome woman, but she possessed an attractiveness far greater than that of mere outward beauty.
Suddenly her brother paused in front of her and began explosively: “I tell you it’s tommy-rot. And it’s all because you wouldn’t call him Bob! How the deuce do you expect a boy you have called ‘Robert’ for twenty-five years, to have any worldly sense?”
“Wait a minute, Bob,” interrupted his sister, quietly; “how could I be expected to call such a splendid boy anything else? ‘Bob,’ for him, would have been nothing short of sacrilege,—no offense meant, my dear brother.”
“Don’t mention it,” he growled; “but I protest that you can make or mar a boy by a name. You called him ‘Robert.’ What was the result?”
“Very fine, I call it.”
Unheeding the interruption, he continued in a mocking voice: “Lacy dresses which he never tore, wax dolls, kittens, and long curls. Now that just naturally led up to books, study, church!”
“That is a combination few people object to, Bob,” his sister gently interpolated.
“If taken in moderation, my dear Stella,—in homeopathic doses. Your boy went on the principle by which some people govern their medicine-taking, that if a little is good, much is better.”
He paused for her reply, but as she was evidently waiting for the close of his harangue, he continued: “Now, look here. Suppose you had called him ‘Bob.’ There would have been no long curls or doll-rags for him. It would have been baseball, marbles, fresh air, boy friends. And now, hang it all, look at him now!”
Mrs. Malloy sat up with dignity, and asked, “Well, what of him now?”