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nydus/The Professor’s HousePublic
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IV

chin. “Of course I don’t! It just comes like that.” She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to like them. Her drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: “No, I can’t really do anybody but Papa, and I can’t make a living painting him.”

“The only unusual thing about Kitty,” her father used to tell his friends, “is that she doesn’t think herself a bit unusual. Nowadays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves remarkable.”

Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after Rosamond’s engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond’s account more than on Kathleen’s; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn’t see how Kathleen’s marriage would benefit Rosie. “Rosie is like your second self,” he once declared to his wife, “but you never pampered yourself at her age as you do her.”

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