"Louie attends to it. He has investigated and rejected several impostors."
"Then, of course, there are other friends of Tom's. The Cranes, for instance?"
Rosamond's face grew hard. "I won't bother you about the Cranes, Papa. We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane is a common creature, and she is advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know what he is."
"Oh, yes! He was about the greatest bluffer I ever had in my classes."
Rosamond had risen to go. "I want you to be awfully happy, daughter," St. Peter went on, "and Tom did. It's only young people like you and Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won't be sorry if you are generous with people like the Cranes."
"Thank you, Papa. I shan't forget." Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. "A hint about the Cranes will be enough," he was thinking.
He didn't in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too "I can-go-it-alone," about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn't like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.
She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at water-colour portrait sketches. She had done several really good likenesses of her father—one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long and severe, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian's beautiful complexion. "No, I don't see Mamma like that," she used to say, throwing out her chin. "Of course I don't! It just comes like that." She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to like them. Her drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: "No, I can't really do anybody but Papa, and I can't make a living painting him."
"The only unusual thing about Kitty," her father used to tell his friends, "is that she doesn't think herself a bit unusual. Nowadays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves remarkable."
Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond's account more than on Kathleen's; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn't see how Kathleen's marriage would benefit Rosie. "Rosie is like your second self," he once declared to his wife, "but you never pampered yourself at her age as you do her."