"Mother isn't so dead set against our going there," Nan informed her. "She would like to make up with Aunt Helen, I know she would, and I know she will say I am to go if I choose."
"Well I shouldn't choose," returned Mary Lee, her head in air. "I don't see how you can feel so. I shouldn't want to make up with them when they have treated mother so mean."
"Aunt Helen hasn't. She's always loved us, but she had to stand by her mother and that was right," persisted Nan. Then in a little superior way—"You don't understand all the ins and outs of it as I do, Mary Lee."
"I don't care," returned Mary Lee, immediately on the defensive. "I think you are very mealy-mouthed and are not showing proper respect to the family."
"Pooh!" returned Nan. "Just you wait till you hear what mother has to say."
This confidence in her mother's opinion somewhat altered Mary Lee's point of view. "Well," she said, "I wouldn't have gone myself, still, I think Aunt Sarah has no right to punish big girls like us for something our mother would not scold us for. She ought to wait till she knows for sure before she ups and makes a prisoner of one of us."
"She'd think she had a right to shut mother up if she did anything Aunt Sarah disapproved of," said Nan, mournfully. "Tell me, Mary Lee, how are you going to explain it to the boys?"
"I'll tell them the truth."
"But you can't say there is a family quarrel and that we aren't allowed to visit our own nearest relations."
"Yes I can. Everybody knows it or suspects it, and we are not the only ones that have had a family quarrel. We can't help our grandmother's being a horrid old skinflint."