"Well, course I haf to act like the people that's already there," Florence retorted, not sharply, but in a musing tone that should have warned him. It was not her wont to use a quiet voice for repartee. Thinking her humble, he laughed the more raucously.
"Oh, Florence!" he besought her. "Say not so! Say not so!"
"Children, children!" Uncle Joseph remonstrated.
Herbert changed his tone; he became seriously plaintive. "Well, she does act that way, Uncle Joseph! When she comes around there you'd think we were runnin' a lunatic asylum, the way she takes on. She hollers and bellers and squalls and squawks. The least little teeny thing she don't like about the way we run our paper, she comes flappin' over there and goes to screechin' around you could hear her out at the Poor House Farm!"
"Now, now, Herbert," his Aunt Fanny interposed. "Poor little Florence isn't saying anything impolite to you—not right now, at any rate. Why don't you be a little sweet to her just for once?"
Her unfortunate expression revolted all the manliness in Herbert's bosom. "Be a little sweet to her?" he echoed with poignant incredulity, and then in candour made plain how poorly Aunt Fanny inspired him. "I just exackly as soon be a little sweet to an alligator," he said.
"Oh, oh!" said Aunt Carrie.
"I would!" Herbert insisted. "Or a mosquito. I'd rather, to either of 'em, 'cause anyway they don't make so much noise. Why, you just ought to hear her," he went on, growing more and more severe. "You ought to just come around our Newspaper Building any afternoon you please, after school, when Henry and I are tryin' to do our work in anyway some peace. Why, she just squawks and squalls and squ——"
"It must be terrible," Uncle Joseph interrupted. "What do you do all that for, Florence, every afternoon?"
"Just for exercise," she answered dreamily; and her placidity the more exasperated her journalist cousin.