eks. There was nothing covert about her, she would drag an
ambushed enemy forth into the open field even at the risk of
damaging disclosures regarding herself.

"Why don't you say jest what you mean, right out, Jennie Stebbins?"
she demanded. "You are hintin' that Fanny and me never had no
education, and twittin' us with it."

"It wa'n't our fault," said Fanny, no less angrily.

"No, it wa'n't our fault," assented Eva. "We had to quit school.
Folks can live with empty heads, but they can't with empty stomachs.
It had to be one or the other. If you want to twit us with bein'
poor, you can, Jennie Stebbins."

"I haven't said anything," said Mrs. Stebbins, with a scared and
injured air. "I'd like to know what you're making all this fuss
about? I don't know. What did I say?"

"If I'd said anything mean, I wouldn't turn tail an' run, I'd stick
to it about one minute and a half, if it killed me," said Eva,
scornfully.

"You know what you was hintin' at, jest as well as we do," said
Fanny; "but it ain't so true as you and some other folks may think,
I can tell you that. If Eva and me didn't go to school as long as
some, we have always read every chance we could get."

"That's so," said Eva, emphatically. "I guess we've read enough
sight more than some folks that has had a good deal more chance to
read. Fanny and me have taken books out of the library full as much
as any of the neighbors, I rather guess."

"We've read every single thing that Mrs. Southworth has ever
written," said Fanny, "and that's sayin' considerable."

"And all Pansy's and Rider Haggard's," declared Eva, with triumph.

"And every one of The Duchess and Marie Corelli, and Sir Walter
Scott, and George Macdonald, and Laura Jean Libbey, and Charles
Reade, and more, besides, than I can think of."

"Fanny has read 'most all Tennyson," said Eva, with loyal
admiration; "she likes poetry, but I don't very well. She has read
most all Tennyson and Longfellow, and we've both read _Queechee_,
and _St. Elmo_, and _Jane Eyre_."

"And we've read the Bible through," said Fanny, "because we read in
a paper once that that was a complete education. We made up our
minds we'd read it through, and we did, though it took us quite a
while."

"And we take _Zion's Herald_, and _The Rowe Gazette_, and _The
Youth's Companion_," said Eva.

"And we've both of us learned Ellen geography and spellin' and
'rithmetic, till we know most as much as she does," said Fanny.

"