Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/70

 instead of busying herself with housewifely duties. She had been known to practise an entire morning on a new piano piece, to spend days in fashioning a velvet tunic for Robbie, or an embroidered skirt for little Aleck, while the boys, happily unconscious, shocked the neighborhood in their well ventilated pinafores and tattered hats.

The two boys were very different, even at the age of five and three, respectively. Robbie, the elder, was the greater rogue of the two, the one who took the initiative in every scheme of mischief, leading the small boys of the neighborhood, as well as his matter-of-fact little brother, into scrapes innumerable. Yet when Emmeline played the piano, or sang an old ballad, the little figure that stole in on tiptoe and curled itself up in the corner of the sofa, that sat there motionless as long as the music lasted, was Robbie's, and Robbie's were the little arms that were most often flung about her neck in a burst of passionate affection, or an equally passionate burst of penitence. It was the little Robbie who was improvident with his playthings, who emptied his entire store of pennies for the roughest tramp who caine their way. It was little Robbie who gave his mother more trouble and more delight than a dozen little Alecks could have done.

Aleck, on the other hand, was his father's boy, the boy for whom Anson already prophesied success in life, and considering that the two were