For James even when he was most exasperating John always felt an involuntary deference that stood quite apart from the sentimental regard which he always tried to owe him as head of the family; for his second brother George he had nothing but contempt. James might be wrongheaded; but George was fatheaded. James kept something of their father's fallen day about him; George was a kind of gross caricature of his own self. Every feature in this brother's face reproduced the corresponding feature in his own with such compelling suggestiveness of a potentially similar degeneration that John could never escape from the reproach of George's insistent kinship. Many times he had been seized by a strong impulse to cut George ruthlessly out of his life; but as soon as he perceived that gibbous development of his own aquiline nose, that reduplication of his own rounded chin, that bull-like thickening of his own sanguine neck, and that saurian accentuation of the eloquent pouches beneath his own eyes, John surrendered to the claims of fraternity and lent George as much as he required at the moment. If Daniel Curtis's desire to marry Hilda had always puzzled him, Eleanor's willingness to be tied for life to George was even more incomprehensible. Still, it was lucky that she had been taken with such a whim, because she was all that stood between George and absolute dependence upon his family, in other words upon his younger brother. Whatever Eleanor's faults, however aggressive her personality, John recognized that she was a hard worker and that the incubus of a husband like George (to whom she seemed curiously and inexplicably devoted) entitled her to a great deal of indulgence.