“Oh, you’re nothing if not a martyr,” responded Lisa, provokingly, as she sailed out of the room.
It was one of the mother’s griefs that these two elder daughters always roused each other’s aggressiveness. They were in reality devotedly attached to each other; but Persis chafed under Lisa’s imperious demands, and Lisa resented Persis’s strict appeals to justice, feeling that she as the oldest of the sisters had greater rights than either of the others. It is not an uncommon state of affairs, and is one that often adjusts itself to an accepted consideration and forbearance as young people mature and learn to respect the good points in one another.
“Lisa always rubs me the wrong way,” pouted Persis to her grandmother.
“Patience, my dear, patience,” was grandma’s reply. “What is wrong now?”
This was when dinner was over, and Persis, after a hot argument with Lisa, had fled to grandma’s quiet room for consolation. It was nearing Christmas, and “The Maids” were planning a holiday entertainment, which just now was the chief topic of conversation in the school.
“Why, grandma,” said Persis, in answer to Mrs. Estabrook’s question, “it’s about the club tea. You know we are all to dress in old-fashioned costumes. It is going to be lovely. Basil has been making sketches for us, and he is so interested in getting up the decorations and all that. You know we have the dear old gowns and buckles and things that you gave us, so we shall not have any trouble in getting up our dresses. We are to wear ancestral costumes if any of us are lucky enough to have them, and we are lucky. Well, you remember that there are four frocks that belonged to our great-great-grandmother, and I want Annis to wear one. But Lisa says she isn’t going to have it so; that she doesn’t want to have us identified so closely with Annis. It’s a shame for her to talk so; for what if Mrs. Brown does keep boarders, she has as good a right to go in the best society as we have.”
“Very true, my dear; what else?”
“Lisa pretends that she hasn’t. She says we can follow out our record on both sides of the house, and that Annis doesn’t know anything about her father’s people; and Lisa says because she is the eldest the extra gown belongs properly to her, and she will not consent to Annis’s wearing it.”
Grandma looked thoughtful. Then she asked, “When is the tea to be?”
“During the Christmas holidays.”