"Since when have you been taken
this way?" he asked at last, mechanically jocular.
"That's all right," she declared with defensive inconsequence.
"It's the way I feel. It's the way I've felt from
the beginning."
He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this
unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part.
He got off the stool and walked about in the little
cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was
to utter something which he could trace to no mental
process of which he had been conscious.
"How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from
the beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence.
"You say I sit on my money-bags and smile--you abuse
me with doing no good with my money--how do you know
I haven't been studying the subject all this while,
and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never
did believe in me!"
She sniffed at him. "I don't believe in you now,
at all events," she said, bluntly.
He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man.
"Why, this very day"--he began, and again was aware
that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue,
which were quite strangers to his brain--"this whole
day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground
you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all
the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself,
watching the people and the things they buy and the way
they live--and thinking out my plans for doing something.
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