"Spike, you take longer at the mirror than your daughter does."

I leaned against Spike's doorway as he applied cologne and combed his wild African mane in a very old cherry mirror that sat atop his low bureau. But Spike, perhaps a little stung by the suggestion that his manhood could be compared to that of a fourteen-year-old, sulkingly and slowly knotted his tie and arranged his cufflinks, never moving from his place in front of that mirror. I have long wondered about my brother's affinity for mirrors (or for his own image) and cannot remember a single morning at our home in Saarbrücken when he did not make us late for school. Indeed, it was he, not even his own mother, who first noticed that his eyes were asymmetrically hued. One, a rich mahogany, the other a slightly darker, coffee color.

Julia laughed, not at my outwardly failed insult, but at her own, albeit truncated, pun, "Herr Spiegel..."

"Don't even, Julia."

"Herr Spiegel..."

"Julia, you're really not very fu..."

"Herr Spiegel mag...," she repeated with more force,

"You don't even know Deutsch."

"...mag seinen Spiegel."

"Shall I throw my hat into the ring?" I'd thought up something quite clever at the time, unremembered now.

"Nigga, please."

"Zhooliah, you sound positively American."

And it was true. Her London accent, a well-harvested product of years of private schooling, was quite easy on the ears and almost completely free from harsh consonants and unpredictable vowels of Manchester, cockney, Cornish, Liverpool or other such "British English" accents.

"I thought of a way to pay me back for my obligatory attendance to your... company event."

"Nothing over ₤200..."

"No, I looked it up. Children under 16 are free. I've wanted to go to the National Gallery for quite some time now. They've got, at the moment, an excellent collection of Renoir and I want to see it before they trade any of the good ones out. Their Degas and Manet collections aren't so wonderful, but I do believe they have one of 'The Waterlilies' to speak of Monet..."

"Listen to her. She's a Spiegel, isn't she? Or a Clemenceau at the very least. Nearly as pretentious as you and me, and at the tender age of thirteen at that..."

"Fourteen and a half. And I am not pretentious," she paused and smiled, "I never said I liked abstract, did I?"

"In my opinion," I stated with the greatest nonchalance I could attain (for I am actually quite passionate on the subject), "a more fitting adjective to describe abstract art, if one even dare call it art, is 'abominable.'"

"'Atrocious' works, too," spoke Zarathustra.

"I'll add 'abhorrent' and 'appalling' to the alliteral mix," the girl said, disinterestedly turning the sparsely-numbered pages of Vanity Fair or Vogue.

"Julia, get your elbows off the table, it's not ladylike."

She complied and I watched her re-arrange the sparkling silver clip that held aurulent silks away from her white face. She had one delightfully surprising taste held away from her other common teenaged interests- a profound love of impressionist art. Her knowledge wasn't spectacularly broad, but it was impressive and detailed when it came to her selected favorites: Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, in that order. I would, in later years, attempt to interest her in the old masters and Dutch and Flemish artists, but they never struck her fancy. (Much to my chagrin, she once referred to Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus as "pointless and of little artistic worth." Pretentious hussy.)

"Do you want to use some cologne, Vincent?"

"Oh, no. I already put mine on... about an hour and a half ago."

"I'm ready, now."

"Seeing Miss Valentine today, daddy?"

"Maybe," he said, attempting, somewhat successfully, considering, not to appear unsettled by his daughter's insinuation, "but she usually finds some way not to come to the corporate picnics. I sometimes wonder if she actually is as invaluable as she thinks."

Spike and Julia chatted down the staircase and to the car dully of the imminent coming of this year's semester and of her first year in secondary school. Approaching the car in the garage, Julia rushed forth and seized the handle of the locked passenger side door.

"What country is this," I hissed, "where a woman rides in front of a man?"

"But it's different here than on the continent!"

"What language!"

"Julia, in back," ordered my dear brother. I laughed with delight as she begrudgingly obliged.

The great black monolith rolled smoothly off the concrete and over the old, smoke-grey pavement.

"You know, Jack Kerouac once said," began Julia.

"You let her read Kerouac before Baudelaire?"

"I never really liked the Baudelaire translations..." murmured my demi-frère.

"I do believe that the entire first chapter of was one single sentence."

"I can recite the first stanza of Invitation to a Voyage."

"No, no: L'Invitation au Voyage, my child." I paused, "ma sœur."

She snorted in disgust. "You're so frustratingly old-fashioned, old man. And that was not a clever reference."

"Proceed, proceed..."

"Nah... L'Invitation is much too overdone. I'll give you Le Revenant."

She cleared her throat, for comedic or dramatic reasons, I assume:

« Comme les anges à l'oeil fauve,
Je reviendrai dans ton alcôve
Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit
Avec les ombres de la nuit... »

"...and?"

"You don't expect me to know the whole thing, do you?"

Spike halted at a red light and Julia sprang from her seat, apparently unseatbelted, pointing out the window.

"Oh, can we pick up Françoise? I'll need some mental refuge at your stupid..."

"Who?" I inquired.

"Nevermind. Elle est la russe. But she's long gone now. You'll probably have her in class."

A prompt electronic ring and subsequent cellular argument superseded my reply and Spike informed us that we were very, dangerously as I recall he put it, late.