The first time he made the sharp turns round their
country house he took nine shingles off the corner and crumpled a fender
like it was tissue paper; but he stuck to it till he got the score down
to two or three shingles only. He seemed right proud of that, like it
was bogey for the course, as you might say. He wasn't the greatest
humourist in the world, being too high-minded, but he appealed to all my
better instincts; he was trying so hard to make the grade out of respect
for his bedizened and homicidal mother.
"And his poor sister, that come along later, was very much like him,
being severe of outline and wearing the same kind of spectacles, and not
fussing much about the fripperies of dress that engross so many of our
empty-headed sex and get 'em the notice of the male. Her complexion was
brutally honest, which was about all her very best-wishers could say for
it, but she was kind-hearted and earnest, and thought a good deal about
the real or inner meaning of life. What she really yearned for was to
stay in Boston and go to concerts, holding the music on her lap and
checking off the notes with a gold pencil when the fiddlers played them.
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