"Who is Mr. Cope?" Becky asked.
Mr. Cope, it seemed, had a cottage across the road from the Admiral's. He leased it, and it was his first season at 'Sconset. His sister had been
with him only a week ago. She had gone "off-shore," but she was coming back.
"Is he young?" Becky asked.
"Well, he isn't old," said Jane, "and he's an artist."
Becky was not in the least interested in Mr. Cope, so she talked to Tristram until he had to go back to his farm and the cows that waited to be milked. Then Becky went into her room, and took off her hat and coat and ran a comb through the bronze waves of her hair. She did not change the straight serge frock in which she had travelled. She went back into the front room and found that Mr. Cope had come.
He was not old. That was at once apparent. And he was not young. He did not look in the least like an artist. He seemed, rather, like a prosperous business man. He wore a Norfolk suit, and his reddish hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. He had rather humorous gray eyes, and Becky thought there was a look of delicacy about his white skin. Later he spoke of having come for his health, and she learned that he had a weak heart.
He had a pleasant laughing voice. He belonged to Boston, but had lived abroad for years.
"With nothing to show for it," he told her with a shrug, "but one portrait. I painted my sister,
and she kept that. But before we left Paris we burned the rest——"