The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow--these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry. “What do you think?” she retorted. “It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.” “Speak out,” his eyes asked her. “Pooh!” She scowled and was silent. But in the silence, this mystery of one to whom she lived so close came uncomfortably nigh. She preferred the cynic-cripple, though his tongue did sear her. He, at least, might be answered or escaped. She went upstairs wondering why the ties of family were so strangely false, why they solved so little and why, since they gave so little, they should demand so much. It did not occur to her that the ties of family were ties of least effort, glutton ties, carnal ties. It did not occur to her that the tuft of white soul within her must revolt, by its very nature, against a law that hallowed such! Adelaide was not strong enough to let things like that occur to her. She merely wondered and went upstairs. Quincy examined the books on the table, though they had not changed in four months; nor in six. He scrutinized the pictures on the walls; he examined a cheap photograph, in an elaborate ivory frame, of Sylvia who had died the winter he was born. He resented, unconsciously, his sister’s perpetuation of this traditional child. His mother could be forgiven for dwelling on Sylvia and Josiah junior. But Adelaide had no excuse. Somewhere within the boy, a recollection must have smouldered of how his father had reckoned up his own unwelcome birth with the death of his two favorites. But this childish embryon of memory had grown, from the boy’s own rationalization, into a distrust of so sheerly sentimental an attachment as must be Adelaide’s for a sister who had died when she was three.