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Miranda hated dolls. She never played with them. She always pulled the wigs off and tied them on the kittens, like hats. The kittens pulled them off instantly. It was fun. She put the doll clothes on the kittens and it took any one of them just half a minute to get them all off again. Kittens had sense. Miranda wailed suddenly, “Oh, I want my doll!” and cried again, trying to drown out the strange little sound, “Weep, weep” —

“Well now, if that’s all,” said her father comfortably, “there’s a raft of dolls at Cedar Grove, and about forty fresh kittens. How’d you like that?”

“Forty?” asked Miranda.

“About,” said Father.

Old Aunt Nannie leaned and held out her hand.”Look, honey, I toted you some nice black figs.”

Her face was wrinkled and black and it looked like a fig upside down with a white ruffled cap. Miranda clenched her eyes tight and shook her head.

“Is that a pretty way to behave when Aunt Nannie offers you something nice?” asked Grandmother in her gentle reminding tone of voice.

“No, ma’am,” said Miranda meekly.”Thank you, Aunt Nannie.” But she did not accept the figs.

Great-Aunt Eliza, half way up a stepladder pitched against the flat-roofed chicken house, was telling Hinry just how to set up her telescope.”For a fellow who never saw or heard of a telescope,” Great-Aunt Eliza said to Grandmother, who was really her sister Sophia Jane, “he doesn’t do so badly so long as I tell him.”

“I do wish you’d stop clambering up stepladders, Eliza,” said Grandmother, “at your time of life.”

“You’re nothing but a nervous wreck, Sophia, I declare. When did you ever know me to get hurt?”

“Even so,” said Grandmother tartly, “there is such a thing as appropriate behavior at your time of …”

Great-Aunt Eliza seized a fold of her heavy brown pleated skirt with one hand, with the other she grasped the ladder one rung higher and ascended another step.”Now Hinry,” she called, “just swing it around facing west and leave it level. I’ll fix it the way I want when I’m ready. You can come on down now.” She came down then herself, and said to her sister: “So long as you can go bouncing off on that horse of yours, Sophia Jane, I s’pose I can climb ladders. I’m three years younger than you, and at your time of lifethat makes all the difference!”

Grandmother turned pink as the inside of a seashell, the one on her sewing table that had the sound of the sea in it; Miranda knew that she had always been the pretty one, and she was pretty still, but Great-Aunt Eliza was not pretty now and never had been. Miranda, watching and listening — for everything in the world was strange to her and something she had to know about — saw two old women, who were proud of being grandmothers, who spoke to children always as if they knew best about everything and children knew nothing, and they told children all day long to come here, go there, do this, do not do that, and they were always right and children never were except when they did anything they were told right away without a word. And here they were bickering like two little girls at school, or even the way Miranda and her sister Maria bickered and nagged and picked on each other and said things on purpose to hurt each other’s feelings. Miranda felt sad and strange and a little frightened. She began edging away.

“Where are you going, Miranda?” asked Grandmother in her everyday voice.

“Just to the house,” said Miranda, her heart sinking.