“I’ve known that this was what it would come to,” said Cyrus gloomily. “You remember what grandfather said? It’s alien blood. They’ll never be like us, either of them.” Estelle’s side of the teeter was up now; her yellow curls were afloat in the heavenly ether, her gleeful laugh came ringing down to us. “She won’t mind what any one says to her, Loveday says, and I’ve noticed it, too.”
It struck me that Cyrus was taking things too hard. It seemed a little funny, that a boy of his age should have thought so seriously about the misbehavior of children. Cyrus seemed to read my thoughts.
“You may think these are small things,” he said, “but they show the alien blood. We always behaved pretty well—even you.”
I dropped upon a stool. Cyrus did sometimes take one’s breath away. If a little mild indignation flamed in my bosom it was speedily quenched by a recollection of the time when Cyrus pulled me—almost by my hair—out of the mud pool in Quagmire swamp, where I had been strictly forbidden to go. I had a vague, painful suspicion that if I should rake up all the past I might be grateful to Cyrus for including me in the “pretty well-behaved,” in spite of his painfully qualifying “even.” The entry in my diary that night was the sage reflection that the impression of our misdeeds remained more strongly with others than with ourselves.
“This kind of behavior,” pursued Cyrus in a judicial tone, “means irresponsibility. They will have to be taken care of for a long time, if not for always. The New England energy and thrift will never be found there. The boy will think that making pictures is the business of life.”
“Sometimes it is. Pictures sell,” I ventured, feeling in myself a broadness of spirit that was almost reckless, and remembering, with a vague dismay, the painted saints.
“Only those by very great artists,” said Cyrus practically. “The rank and file of the profession are apt to be out at the elbows.”
I listened admiringly, he was so confident in wisdom, but I wondered dimly how he knew, for very few artists had ever found their way to Palmyra.
“You know how it was, once,” Cyrus continued hesitatingly. “Grandfather had to provide.”
I suppose I had gathered the fact vaguely, from the talk of my elders, but childhood blessedly depreciates practical cares. And what more appropriate, as it seemed to me, than that grandpa, whom I thought the greatest potentate on earth, should pay everybody’s bills?