“Grandma, you’re a dear, sweet darling. I love you to pieces,” Persis said. “I’m so happy to think you don’t mind my learning to ride.”
“Who said I didn’t mind?”
“Why, Basil. Didn’t you mean it?” And for a moment Persis’s hopes fell. Grandma was too tender-hearted to declare she had never said anything of the kind, and so she only kissed the eager face and said, “Well, my child, I am old-fashioned, I suppose, but you will not go off the side street, will you? I can’t quite stand the thought of seeing you in a more public place.” And Persis’s hopes rose again.
“I think it has been a perfectly lovely Hallowe’en,” she avowed to Lisa, as she vigorously brushed her hair.
“Yes, it has been great fun for you. After all your talk about those boys coming, I notice you are the first one to be hand and glove with them. That’s just like you, always at one extreme or the other,” Lisa retorted. She could not entirely forgive Persis for having been the first to win the boys’ good graces.
“Well, I’d like to know if you didn’t have the same chance for a good time that I did. You should have made the most of your opportunities. That’s just like you, Lisa. You’re always complaining that I have good times, when you have exactly the same chances that I have. The only difference is, that I go and meet the chances, and you sit and wait for them to come to you, because you’re so terribly afraid that somehow you’ll be called upon to step down from your pedestal. If you didn’t cling so close to that pedestal of yours you’d have a better time. I don’t sit still all the time looking for homage. I’d have a pretty stupid time if I did.”
“And precious little you’d get if you looked for it,” asserted Lisa, now more ruffled than before. “I am the eldest, and of course certain things are due me.”
“Oh, dear!” thought Persis. “I wish Lisa were not so terribly tenacious of her prerogatives. They are always getting in my way, and I get snubbed because I don’t regard them. I wonder if I would be so top-lofty and sniffy if I were the eldest. Maybe I would be.” And she suppressed a smile as Lisa threw her a haughty glance from under half-closed lids,—a glance which was meant to convey a sense of superiority.
“Lisa, you would surely have been a Pharisee if you had lived in Bible times,” remarked the irrepressible Persis.
“Then I suppose you would have been a publican and sinner. You don’t have to go back to those times to be the latter.”