The Family
plexion. “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.”
“The only unusual thing about Kitty,” her father used to tell his friends, “is that she doesn’t think herself a bit unusual. Nowdays 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
—65—
