Antonia held out a photograph of Lena that had come from San Francisco last
Christmas. `Does she still look like that? She hasn't been home for six
years now.' Yes, it was exactly like Lena, I told her; a comely woman, a
trifle too plump, in a hat a trifle too large, but with the old lazy eyes,
and the old dimpled ingenuousness still lurking at the corners of her
mouth.
There was a picture of Frances Harling in a befrogged riding costume that I
remembered well. `Isn't she fine!' the girls murmured. They all assented.
One could see that Frances had come down as a heroine in the family
legend. Only Leo was unmoved.
`And there's Mr. Harling, in his grand fur coat. He was awfully rich,
wasn't he, mother?'
`He wasn't any Rockefeller,' put in Master Leo, in a very low tone, which
reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had once said that my
grandfather `wasn't Jesus.' His habitual scepticism was like a direct
inheritance from that old woman.
`None of your smart speeches,' said Ambrosch severely.
Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke into a
giggle at a tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated, with an
awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them: Jake and Otto
and I! We had it taken, I remembered, when we went to Black Hawk on the
first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska.
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