Easterbrook you wouldn't mind a bit sitting in a big
chair before the fire with a pair of old slippers on, if your feet
were tired.
Mr. Easterbrook doesn't care for music. He's a broker. He looks
awfully bored when the violinist is playing, and he fidgets with his
watch-chain, and clears his throat very loudly just before he
speaks every time. His automobile is bigger and handsomer than the
violinist's. (Aunt Hattie says the violinist's automobile is a hired
one.) And Mr. Easterbrook's flowers that he sends to Mother are
handsomer, too, and lots more of them, than the violinist's. Aunt
Hattie has noticed that, too. In fact, I guess there isn't anything
about Mr. Easterbrook that she doesn't notice.
Aunt Hattie likes Mr. Easterbrook lots better than she does the
violinist. I heard her talking to Mother one day. She said that any
one that would look twice at a lazy, shiftless fiddler with probably
not a dollar laid by for a rainy day, when all the while there was
just waiting to be picked an estimable gentleman of independent
fortune and stable position like Mr. Easterbrook--well, she had her
opinion of her; that's all. She meant Mother, of course. _I_ knew
that. I'm no child.
Mother knew it, too; and she didn't like it.
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