“Sit down now, you bad child,” whispered Mrs. Lambert, patting Jane’s ruddy cheek, “and don’t talk. Your father is going to.”
The family sat silent and expectant, while Mr. Lambert gravely salted his porridge, then fumbled for his steel-rimmed spectacles in the pocket of his coat, fitted them on his high-bridged nose, and at length cleared his throat.
By this time Jane, whose curiosity was of the most irrepressible variety, had all but broken her neck by craning and wriggling in her chair to see the letter which lay beside her father’s plate. It bore a foreign stamp, and she guessed, and guessed rightly that it had some bearing on Mr. Lambert’s gravity of demeanor. Finally, unable to endure her father’s pompous preparations for speech any longer she pointed to the envelope, and inquired timidly,
“Who’s that from, Papa?”
“That is none of your affair, Jane,” said Carl, with perfect truth, but in his unfortunately superior and reproving way, “and you are very ill-mannered.”
He spoke with his characteristically priggish air, with a pomposity ludicrously like his father’s, and doubly ludicrous in a lad of barely sixteen.
Carl, who was Mr. Lambert’s darling, was at that time a tall, thin, delicate looking boy, with a long pale face, straight brown hair, which was cut in a bang across his forehead, and a pair of nearsighted, light grey eyes, that blinked owlishly behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.
It is true that his character was as nearly faultless as it is possible for any youth’s character to be; he was quiet, studious, and dutiful. At school he shone as by far the best of all the pupils, and at home he was never known to disobey a single rule of the household. Intelligent beyond the average, with a precocious love of accuracy; astonishingly, even irritatingly self-controlled, and with a dry judicial quickness and keenness already strongly developed, he was an unusually promising boy, in whom one already saw the successful, complacent, cool-tempered man. But at the same time he neither cared for, nor could boast of great popularity. His mother felt more awe than affection for him; in all of his sisters but Jane, he inspired only a sort of timid admiration and respect; and his school-companions summed him up tersely as a “muff” and a “grind.” For, while he walked away with the highest honors at the close of every session, he was, if the truth must be told, something of a coward. He had moods of sulkiness, and moods of maddening superiority. His brain was nimble enough, but he had never been known to accept any challenge to match his physical strength and courage with theirs. He professed a deep contempt for their primitive and barbaric methods of settling difficulties, and adroitly evaded the outcome of any schoolboy’s discussion that seemed likely to end in mortal combat, by yielding his point with a self-contained, contemptuous politeness, and a premature diplomacy which mystified and enraged his companions.
Jane only was not to be dominated by his assumption of patronizing authority; and at his unsolicited correction, she promptly bristled up. It rarely took much to rouse the fiery, impulsive Jane.
“Mind your own business!”