He darted to the bureau
with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat
face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elder
brother George. I told you about 'im lots of times."
He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.
My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty
slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being
struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her
complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a
long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning
dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little
quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt
to follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain
hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be
saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as came to know
her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension,
a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that was--to borrow a
phrase from my schoolboy language "Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother
and me, and back to her husband again.
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