Over and over again she met his propositions with a saying
which he could recall having particularly hated on their
father's lips,--"It's ill teaching an old dog new tricks."
"You ought to have them taught you with a stick,"
he had told her roundly, on the last occasion.
She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him.
"You think you can bully everybody and make them crawl
to you,--but there's no good your trying it on with me,"
she had told him, and he had pushed his way out of the shop
almost stamping his feet. It was clear to him at that moment
that he would never darken her door again.
Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged
with a cigar and a City paper in his apartment at the hotel
after luncheon, wondering whether it were too hot to issue
forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea of going
round to see his sister kept coming into his mind.
He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the
paper,--but off it slipped again to the old book-shop,
and to that curious, cross-grained figure, its mistress.
He abandoned himself to thinking about her--and discovered
that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration.
She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew--the
only creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire
to make something out of him.
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