Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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“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.