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Show 76 Twenty-four After that, the men begin to take turns. It happens only informally at first; Roderick asks his brother if he'd stay with Annis while he goes out for a couple of hours to check the correspondence from his office; Evan asks Rod to keep an eye in the afternoon, as he'd like to do some undisturbed reading; both brothers suggest to their father that he sit with Annis, as they'd like to go out to talk together for a while. But they also call Luel's kid from the upstairs room, because they are not quite sure their frail old father could- or would-restrain his wife. "Just keep an eye on her, will you," they say to the child. The girl's thin body assumes an automatic, insolent posture, only slightly disguised by the loose shirts she wears. "What for?" "You know what for." Roderick does not like this girl very much, not just because she so tangibly represents the early indiscretions of his sister Luel, but because she seems to embody so many of Luel's qualities: the remoteness, the aloofness, the utter resistance to authority. In Luel these qualities had been attractive; but there wasn't any Luel now, only this sad, unhappy child, sitting forlornly in her room, responding only with anger, or insolence, or silence, to those around her. Sometimes the girl would go off for the afternoon, or the night, walking, or in her car, but she always seemed to return, to wait half-insolently, half-sadly, around the house. Rod cannot understand why she would bother to come here, now that her mother is dead and her connections with them severed; her father had remarried shortly after Luel's death and took |