"Well, that certainly ought to keep you out of mischief. You'll be safe enough if you stick to your book. If anything should happen, just remember that I'm at Bettie's."
"Yes, Grandma," said Marjory, with a comical grimace.
Jean laughed, ran around the house, and squeezed through the hole in the back fence.
Half an hour later, lonely Laura, discovering the girls on their doorstep, amused herself by sicking the dog at them. Towser, however, merely growled lazily for a few moments and then went to sleep in the sunshine—he, at least, cherished no particular grudge against the girls and probably by that time he recognized them as neighbors.
Then Laura perched herself on one of the square posts of the dividing fence and began to sing—in her high, rasping, exasperating voice—a song that was almost too personal to be pleasant. It had taken Laura almost two hours to compose it, some days before, and fully another hour to commit it to memory, but she sang it now in an offhand, haphazard way that led the girls to suppose that she was making it up as she went along. It ran thus:
There's a lanky girl named Jean,
Who's altogether too lean.
Her mouth is too big,
And she wears a wig,
And her eyes are bright sea-green.
Of course it was quite impossible to read even a thrillingly interesting book with rude Laura making such a disturbance. If the girls had been wise, they would have gone into the house and closed the door, leaving Laura without an audience; but they were not wise and they were curious. They couldn't help waiting to hear what Laura was going to sing about the rest of them, and they did not need to wait long; Laura promptly obliged them with the second verse:
There's another named Marjory Vale,
Who's about the size of a snail.
Her teeth are light blue—
She hasn't but two—
And her hair is much too pale.
Laura had, in several instances, sacrificed truth for the sake of rhyme, but enough remained to injure the vanity of the subjects of her song very sharply. Marjory breathed quickly for a moment and flushed pink but gave no audible sign that she had heard. Laura, somewhat disappointed, proceeded:
There's a silly young lass called Bet,
Thinks she's ev'rybody's sweet pet.
She slapped my brother,
Fibbed to my mother—
I know what she's going to get.