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“Hello, sis,” said Mildred by way of greeting. She dropped into a chair, smoothing down the front of her white middy blouse and fanning her flushed face with the broad ends of her sailor tie. Then observing her sister’s despondent attitude: “What are you in the dumps about? Has that new beau of yours turned out a disappointment? Or what?”

In a passionate little burst Emmy Lou’s simmering indignation boiled up and overflowed.

“Oh, it’s Aunt Sharley again! Honestly, Mil, she was absolutely unbearable this evening. It was bad enough to have her go stalking across the lawn with that old snuff stick of hers stuck in the corner of her mouth, and singing that terrible song of hers at the very top of her lungs and wearing that scandalous old straw hat stuck up on her topknot–that was bad enough, goodness knows! I don’t know what sort of people Har–Mr. Winslow thinks we must be! But that was only the beginning.”

Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint Mildred’s lips had tightened in angered sympathy.

“It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em,” she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. “You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time. Don’t you think you’re the only one she picks on. Why, don’t you remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the Sophie K. Foster with Sidney Baumann?–told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put to bed for daring to run round with ‘codfish aristocracy’–the very words she used. What right has she, I want to know, to be criticising Sidney Baumann’s people? I’m sure he’s as nice a boy as there is in this whole town; seems to me he deserves all the more credit for working his way up among the old families the way he has. I don’t care if his father was a nobody in this town when he first came here.

“Quality folks–quality folks! She’s always preaching about our being quality folks and about it being wrong for us to demean ourselves by going with anybody who isn’t quality folks until I’m sick and tired of the words. She has quality folks on the brain! Does she think we are still babies? You’re nearly twenty-three and I’m past twenty-one. We have our own lives to live. Why should we be so—-“

She broke off at the sound of a limping footstep in the hall.

“Supper’s ready,” announced Aunt Sharley briefly. “You chillen come right in an’ eat it whilst it’s hot.”

Strangely quiet, the two sisters followed the old negress back to the dining room. Aunt Sharley, who had prepared the meal, now waited upon them. She was glumly silent herself, but occasionally she broke, or rather she punctuated, the silence with little sniffs of displeasure. Only once did she speak, and this was at the end of the supper, when she had served them with blackberries and cream.

“Seem lak de cat done got ever’body’s tongue round dis place to-night!” she snapped, addressing the blank wall above the older girl’s head. “Well, ’tain’t no use fur nobody to be poutin’ an’ sullin’. ‘Tain’t gwine do ’em no good. ‘Tain’t gwine budge me nary hair’s brea’th frum whut I considers to be my plain duty. Ef folkses don’t lak it so much de wuss fur dem, present company not excepted. Dat’s my say an’ I done said it!”

And out of the room she marched with her head held defiantly high.

That night there were callers. At the Dabney home there nearly always were callers of an evening, for the two sisters were by way of being what small-town society writers call reigning belles. Once, when they had first returned from finishing school the year before, a neighbouring lady, meeting Aunt Sharley on the street, had been moved to ask whether the girls had many beaus, and Aunt Sharley, with a boastful flirt of her under lip which made her side face look something like the profile of a withered but vainglorious dromedary, had answered back: