om sweet-tempered; and Laura formed no exception.
Pin, her most frequent companion, had to bear the brunt of her
acrimony: hence the two were soon at war again. For Pin was tactless,
and took small heed of her sister's grumpy moods, save to cavil at
them. Laura's buttoned-upness, for instance, and her love of solitude,
were perverse leanings to Pin's mind; and she spoke out against them
with the assurance of one who has public opinion at his back. Laura
retaliated by falling foul of little personal traits in Pin: a nervous
habit she had of clearing her throat--her very walk. They quarrelled
passionately, having branched as far apart as the end-points of what is
ultimately to be a triangle, between which the connecting lines have
not yet been drawn.

Sometimes they even came to blows.

"I'll fetch your ma to you--that I will!" threatened Sarah, called by
the noise of the scuffle. "Great girls like you--fightin' like
bandicoots! You ought to be downright ashamed o' yourselves."

"I don't know what's come over you two, I'm sure," scolded Mother, when
the combatants had been parted and brought before her in the kitchen,
where she was rolling pastry. "You never used to go on like this.--Pin,
stop that noise. Do you want to deafen me?"

"She hit me first," sobbed Pin. "It's always Laura who begins."

"I'll teach her to cheek me like that!"

"Well, all I can say is," said Mother exasperated, and pushed a lock of
hair off her perspiring forehead with the back of her hand. "All I say
is, big girls as you are, you deserve to have the nonsense whipped out
of you.--As for you, Laura, if this is your only return for all the
money I've spent on you, then I wish from my heart you'd never seen the
inside of that Melbourne school."

"How pretty your eyes look, mother, when your eyelashes get floury!"
said Laura, struck by the vivid contrast of black and white. She merely
stated the fact, without intent to flatter, her anger being given to
puffing out as suddenly as it kindled.

"Oh, get along with you!" said Mother, at the same time skilfully
lifting and turning a large, thin sheet of paste. "You can't get round
ME like that."

"You used to have nice, ladylike manners," she said on another
occasion, when Laura, summoned to the drawingroom to see a visitor, had
in Mother's eyes disgraced them both. "Now, you've no more idea how to
behave than a country bumpkin. You sit there, like a stock or a stone,
as if you didn't know how