r's beauty.
Perhaps doing so satisfied her personal vanity by deputy. She was
content with her own self, but had no admiration for it.

"You _are_ a dear good mammy. Fancy your losing all the best time
of the morning indoors!"

"How the best time of the morning, chick?"

"Sitting with that old cat upstairs.... Well, I can't help it. She
_is_ an old cat."

"You're a perverse little monkey, kitten; that's what _you_ are!"
Rosalind laughed with an excuse--or caress, it may be--in her laugh.
"No," she continued, "we are much too hard on that old lady, both of
us. Do you know, to-day she was quite entertaining--told me all about
her own wedding-day, and how all the bridesmaids had the mumps."

"Has she never told you that before?"

"Only once. Then she told me about the late-lamented, and what a
respect he had for her judgment, and how he referred to her at every
crisis. I didn't think her at all bad company."

"Because you're a darling. I suppose you had it all about how
Prosy, when he was a boy, wanted to study music, and how his pa
said that the turning-point in the career of youth lay in the choice
of a profession."

"Oh yes! And how his strong musical turn came from her side of the
family. In herself it was dormant. But her Aunt Sophia had never once
put her finger on a false note of the piano. This was confirmed by
the authority of her eminent uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, himself no
mean musician."

"Poor Prosy! I know."

"And how musical faculty--amounting to genius--often remained
absolutely unsuspected owing to its professor having no inheritance.
But it would come out in the children. Then, and not till then,
tardy justice was done.... Well, I don't know exactly how she worked
it out, but she managed to suggest that she was Handel and Mozart
in abeyance. Her son's fair complexion clinched matters. It was the
true prototype of her own. A thoroughly musical complexion,
bespeaking German ancestry."

"Isn't that the omnibus?" says Sally. But, no, it isn't. She
continues: "I don't believe in musical complexions. Look at Julius
Bradshaw--dark, with high cheek-bones, and a thin olive hand with
blue veins in it. I say, mother...."

"What, chick?"

"He's changed his identity--Julius Bradshaw has. I can't believe he
was that spooney boy that used to come hankering after me at church."
And the amusement this memory makes hangs about Sally's lips as the
two sit on into a pause of silence.

The face of the mo