: The Keeper of the Door by Dell Ethel M Ethel May - Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

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PART I

THE LESSON

"Then he's such a prig!" said Olga.

"You should never use a word you can't define," observed Nick, from the depths of the hammock in which his meagre person reposed at length.

She made a face at him, and gave the hammock a vicious twitch which caused him to rock with some violence for several seconds. As he was wont pathetically to remark, everyone bullied him because he was small and possessed only one arm, having shed the other by inadvertence somewhere on the borders of the Indian Empire.

Certainly Olga--his half-brother's eldest child--treated him with scant respect, though she never allowed anyone else to be other than polite to him in her hearing. But then she and Nick had been pals from the beginning of things, and this surely entitled her to a certain licence in her dealings with him. Nick, too, was such a darling; he never minded anything.

Having duly punished him for snubbing her, she returned with serenity to the work upon her lap.

"You see," she remarked thoughtfully, "the worst of it is he really is a bit of a genius. And one can't sit on genius--with comfort. It sort of flames out where you least expect it."

"Highly unpleasant, I should think," agreed Nick.

"Yes; and he has such a disgusting fashion of behaving as if--as if one were miles beneath his notice," proceeded Olga. "And I'm not a chicken, you know, Nick, I'm twenty."

"A vast age!" said Nick.

For which remark she gave him another jerk which set him swinging like a pendulum.

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