tch.

LAURA (_starting up_). Why, Mother dear, when did you come in?

JULIA (_interposing with arresting hand_). Don't! You mustn't try to
touch her, or she goes.

LAURA. Goes?

JULIA. I can't explain. She is not quite herself. She doesn't always hear
what one says.

LAURA (_assertively_). She can hear me. (_To prove it, she raises her
voice defiantly._) Can't you, Mother?

MRS. R. (_the voice perhaps reminding her_). Jane, dear, I wonder what's
become of Laura, little Laura: she was always so naughty and difficult to
manage, so different from Martha--and the rest.

LAURA. Lor', Julia! Is it as bad as that? Mother, 'little Laura' is here,
sitting in front of you. Don't you know me?

MRS. R. Do you remember, Jane, one day when we'd all started for a walk,
Laura had forgotten to bring her gloves, and I sent her back for them?
And on the way she met little Dorothy Jones, and she took her gloves off
her, and came back with them just as if they were her own.

LAURA. What a good memory you have, Mother! I remember it too. She was an
odious little thing, that Dorothy--always so whiney-piney.

JULIA. More tea, Laura?

(_Laura pushes her cup at her without remark,_ _for she has been kept
waiting; then, in loud tones, to suit the one whom she presumes to be
rather deaf:_)

LAURA. Mother! Where are you living now?

MRS. R. I'm living, my dear.

LAURA. I said 'where?'

JULIA. We live where it suits us, Laura.

LAURA. Julia, I wasn't addressing myself to you. Mother, where _are_ you
living? . . . Why, _where_ has she gone to?

(_For now we perceive that this gentle Old Lady so devious in her
conversation has a power of self-possession, of which, very retiringly,
she avails herself._)

JULIA (_improving the occasion, as she hands back the cup, with that
touch of superiority so exasperating to a near relative_). Now you see!
If you press her too much, she goes. . . . You'll have to accommodate
yourself, Laura.

LAURA (_imposing her own explanation_). I think you gave me _green_ tea,
Julia . . . or have had it yourself.

JULIA (_knowing better_). The dear Mother seldom stays long, except when
she finds me alone.

(_Having insinuated this barb into the flesh of her 'dear sister,' she
takes up her crochet with an air of great contentment. Mrs._ _James,
meanwhile, to make herself more at home, now that tea is finished, undoes
her bonnet-strings with a tug, and lets them hang. She is not in the best
of tempers.