"So she oughter be!" retorted the old lady, "with sech a bringin' up ez she's hed. But land! childern's dretful disappointin' ter a pusson. There ain't a selfish bone in my body, but Penel's ez full uv 'em. She'll let me lie awake by the hour at a time while she's a' snoozin' on the sofy beside me. She don't sleep in her own bed any more because I hev ter hev her handy ter rub me when the rheumatiz gits ter jumpin'. She sez she can't help bein' drowsy when she's workin' through the day, but land! she'd manage ter keep awake ef she hed any sympathy! She ain't got no sympathy, Penel ain't; an' she ain't a bit forehanded.
"But I don't 'spect nuthin' else in this world. It's a wale o' tears an' we ain't got nuthin' else ter look fer but triberlation an' woe. Man ez born ter trouble ez the sparks fly upward, an' a woman allers hez the lion's share."
Evadne burst into the sitting-room with flashing eyes. "Aunt Marthe, if I were Penelope Riggs, I would shoot her mother! She's just a crooked old bundle of unreasonableness and ingratitude!"
Mrs. Everidge laughed. "No, you wouldn't dear, not if you were
Penelope."
"But, Aunt Marthe, how does she stand it? Why, it would drive me crazy in a week! To think of that poor soul, working like a slave all day, and then grudged the few winks of sleep she gets on a hard old sofa. I declare, it makes me feel hopeless!"
"The day I climbed Mont Blanc," said Mrs. Everidge softly, "we had a wonderful experience. Down below us a sudden storm swept the valley. The rain fell in torrents, and the thunder roared, but up where we stood the sun was shining and all was still. When we walk with Christ, little one, we find it possible to live above the clouds."
"An Alpine Christian!" cried Evadne. "Oh, Aunt Marthe, that is beautiful!"
CHAPTER XIII.
"The ancient Egyptians, Evadne," remarked Mr. Everidge the next day at dinner, as he selected the choicest portions of a fine roast duck for his own consumption, "during the period of their nation's highest civilization, subsisted almost exclusively upon millet, dates and other fruits and cereals; and athletic Greece rose to her greatest culture upon two meals a day, consisting principally of maize and vegetables steeped in oil. Don't you think you ladies would find it of advantage to copy them in this laudable abstemiousness? There is something repugnant to a refined taste in the idea of eating flesh whose constituent particles partake largely of the nature of our own."
"Why, certainly, Uncle Horace," said Evadne merrily. "I am quite ready to become a vegetarian, if you will set me the example. The feminine mind, you know, is popularly supposed to be only fitted to follow a masculine lead."