Occasionally I heard Miss Pride speak of her niece to friends who came to the Hotel. I recollect one conversation I heard when Mrs. Brooks, who had brought Hopestill to the Hotel some years before, had come to spend the night. Miss Pride said, “I sometimes wish I had never seen the child, Josie. Yesterday I had a most unfavorable letter from one of the counselors. She’s a born trouble-maker, you know. What will she be at twenty? It’s not only bravado—one can’t begrudge a child a measure of that. It’s a deep rebelliousness against everything fitting and proper.”

“You exaggerate, Lucy,” replied Mrs. Brooks. “You can’t get her father out of your mind. Amy says all the girls like her. Isn’t that the important thing, after all, at her age?”

“I don’t believe Amy said that, Josie,” said Miss Pride, peering deeply into her cousin’s skull. “Did she now, truly? No, I won’t make you answer, for I know what’s what. But anyhow, it’s not what she does now that worries me, it is what she will do when she has, so to speak, reached the age of discretion. For I am as certain as I am that you are sitting here with me that with her it will be indiscretion. The counselor wrote me that she had been caught smoking. At fifteen, Josie! And that she had tried to run off from camp in a baker’s truck. I won’t have you telling me that these are only a child’s pranks. There is something loose in her character. Her holiday tantrums are blood-curdling! If she were not a child, she would have apoplexy, I’m quite sure—her face turns as blue as the sky.”

Mrs. Brooks stretched out a consoling hand. “Lucy, you will never change. We can’t all have your self-control, my dear! Why, Amy, your affectionate Amy Brooks, has her temper too. It’s Hope’s lovely red hair, as the superstition goes. But don’t suppose I don’t sympathize with you.”

“I must confess her hair endears her to me.”

“It should. She looks more like you every year.”

As I was removing the plates, Miss Pride said, “By the way, Josie, remind me to show you the pen-wiper this child made for me. Isn’t she clever to be a chambermaid and seamstress when she’s only thirteen?”

Mrs. Brooks smiled at me and I noticed that her left eye twitched as she did so. “I should say! I expect my Amy and your Hope could learn a great many useful things from her. Is your father a fisherman?”

“Her father is a fuyard,” said Miss Pride. She explained to me that she had told Mrs. Brooks that my father was a cobbler and added, “You don’t know French, do you, Sonie? It’s German you know, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am. In German it’s Schuhmacher.”