Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. > “A hint about the Cranes will be enough,” he was
He didn’t in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more than Rosamond.
When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close.
There was something too plucky, too “I can-go-it-alone,” about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn’t like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.
She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at watercolour portrait sketches. She had done several really good likenesses of her father—one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long and severe, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian’s beautiful complexion. “No, I don’t see Mamma like that,” she used to say, throwing out her 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.”