“Yes, Brooke was twenty-four last May, and it seems now that they should call her by her rightful Christian name, Pamela, instead of that absurd one that might as well be stick or stone. You did not know she had any other? Oh, it is her middle name to be sure—Pamela Brooke Lawton. Her mother was one of the proud old Virginia Brookes, and they say, failing of male heirs in the South, they often call a daughter by her mother’s maiden name. Mannish and affected though, I call it, still I must own it did suit her eight years ago, for she had as many ways and turns and deep and shallow places as that little stream on Windy Hill that begins in only a thread that wouldn’t move a fern, and then widens to the Glen Mill-pond, and saws all the wood hereabouts and grinds the flour for Gilead. “Yes, she has been here several times, though never to stay long; mostly she came with her great friend, Lucy Dean, when they were at school at Farmington. I never liked _her_ though, she had a way of asking point-blank questions and calling a spade a spade that sent a chill through you.” “And what has Brooke been doing since she’s been a woman grown? What, for the last four years?” asked the doctor, returning to the present with new interest at sound of Brooke’s name. “Let me see,” and Miss Keith began counting on her fingers; “after Brooke left school, she and her mother and father, with the Dean girl and the Cub, spent one summer travelling in the West,—Adam was nosing out some scheme or other. Then the women folks went to Europe for a year or more, leaving young Adam, the Cub,—that’s what they call the boy, and I must say, poor lad, he does seem a misfit and hard to manage,—at a military boarding-school somewhere. “The Dean girl had a voice that her people thought worth the training, though I never heard what became of it after, and Brooke wanted to go on with her painting. Oh, yes, she does really paint—doesn’t just dabble colours together like a marble cake, such as most pictures are, and call it Art. Why, she got a prize, they say, in a New York exhibition for a picture of some children eating cherries. I’ve got a photograph of it, that she sent me, on my bureau. It’s fine work, good judges say; all the same, to my eye it lacks one thing—it doesn’t look just quite alive. If she was poor and had to work and kept on, I guess she’d get somewhere; but now she’s at home again, and in society, and not being in need of money, I suppose she’ll let the painting slip, except maybe to make candy boxes for charity fairs and such. “Adam’s always been too busy ever to have much of a settled home. They travelled about mostly of summers, and since they left the house down town two years ago, where the children were born, they’ve lived in a big sort of apartment arrangement, half flat, half hotel, as near as I can make it out—‘It gives mamma no responsibility,’ Brooke wrote in telling of it. But without some responsibility you can’t get much home comfort, to my thinking.