Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/260

242 “Oh, but, mamma, if you realized how I long to be a great painter, and how I hate all this trouble of dressing  up and making myself agreeable to people, especially to  men who are so stupid; really, I wish that I need not  do it.”

Brenda remembered these discussions, and she recalled (for it was only two or three years before) that Agnes would often make her work the excuse when some particularly agreeable man would come to call,—“agreeable,”  at least from Brenda’s point of view, although apparently  less agreeable from that of Agnes.

“They could n’t even see her when they called on Sunday afternoons,” and Brenda smiled at the remembrance; “for she was always off somewhere studying cloud effects  or something of that kind. She used to say that she thought that the average young man was the stupidest  creature. Why, I thought that she went to Paris on purpose to avoid society and to give all her time to her work. But here she is spending every minute that she can with Ralph Weston, when she really ought to be doing other  things. Well, perhaps he is n’t an average young man. That’s the kind she used to say she did n’t care for.”

Yet if he was n’t the “average young man” from the point of view of Agnes, Brenda found her prospective  brother-in-law delightful. It took her several days to call him Ralph to his face, and behind his back she was very  apt to say “Ralph Weston.” But he pleased her exceedingly by treating her exactly as if she were grown-up,  that is, he often asked her opinion on important subjects,