There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads
as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then
the cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt
appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.

"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's brought
over her son!" His eye roamed about the room. He darted to the bureau
with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat
face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elder
brother George. I told you about 'im lots of times."

He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty
slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being
struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her
complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a
long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning
dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little
quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt
to follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain
hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be
saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as came to know
her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension,
a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that was--to borrow a
phrase from my schoolboy language "Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother
and me, and back to her husband again.

"You know," he said. "George."