Katy stiffened. Her red face paled slightly. She turned her back and slowly slid into the oven the pie she was carrying. She closed the door with more force than was necessary and then turned and deliberately studied Linda from the top of her shining black head to the tip of her shoe.
“Some,” she said tersely.
“Yes, I know ‘some’,” said Linda, “but you know I was too young to pay much attention, and Daddy managed always to make me so happy that I never realized until he was gone that he not only had been my father but my mother as well. You know what I mean, Katy.”
“Yes,” said Katy deliberately, “I know what ye mean, lambie, and I’ll tell ye the truth as far as I know it. She managed your father, she pampered him, but she deceived him every day, just about little things. She always made the household accounts bigger than they were, and used the extra money for Miss Eileen and herself—things like that. I’m thinkin’ he never knew it. I’m thinking he loved her deeply and trusted her complete. I know what ye’re getting at. She was not enough like Eileen to make him unhappy with her. He might have been if he had known all there was to know, but for his own sake I was not the one to give her away, though she constantly made him think that I was extravagant and wasteful in me work.”
Linda’s eyes came back from the mountains and met Katy’s straightly.
“Katy,” she said, “did you ever see sisters as different as Eileen and I are?”
“No, I don’t think I ever did,” said Katy.
“It puzzles me,” said Linda slowly. “The more I think about it, the less I can understand why, if we are sisters, we would not accidentally resemble each other a tiny bit in some way, and I must say I can’t see that we do physically or mentally.”
“No,” said Katy, “ye were just as different as ye are now when I came to this house new and ye were both little things.”
“And we are going to be as different and to keep on growing more different every day of our lives, because red war breaks out the minute Eileen comes home. I haven’t a notion what she will say to me for what I did last night and what I am going to do in the future, but I have a definite idea as to what I am going to say to her.”