“Perhaps,” judged Marsden, opening a book, “it is only fair Adelaide should have some benefit out of her loss of Rhoda.”
“Oh, very well, I’ll go alone,” Sarah shifted her point, with unconscious agility. And once more she observed the storm, as if she had been called upon to brave it. “Let your Mother go alone in the snow.”
“I’ll help you into the machine, Mama,” said Quincy. This irritated Sarah. The mention of the car lessened the woman’s heroism in braving such a storm to gladden a few more forgotten hearts. And what right had a son to deprive a woman of her heroism, whom wealth had deprived already of her less far-fetched qualities?
But at last, Sarah got off. As Marsden settled in his splendid chair, he smiled quizzically at Adelaide, left alone with him for a minute.
“What are you going to talk about?” he asked.
The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow—these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.
“What do you think?” she retorted.
“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.”
“Speak out,” his eyes asked her.
“Pooh!” She scowled and was silent.