"I can answer for myself," said Rose. "I may say that the memory was burnt in with a slipper."
"I never was spanked," murmured Tiny. "That is one of the many things I am grateful for. It must be so humiliating to have been spanked."
"Who can tell what futures may lie in a slipper?" replied Rose, who had a reputation for being clever. "I am sure that my slipperings, for instance, generated a tendency for epigram; something swift and sharp. It destroyed the tendency to bawl continuously,—the equivalent of the great national habit of monologue."
"Rose, you are quite too frightfully clever," said Tiny, with an assumption of languor. "You will be writing a book next."
"I will make 'Léna the heroine," retorted Rose, with a keen glance, "and call it 'The Sphinx of Menlo Park.'"
"Fancy 'Léna being called a sphinx," said Ila, who was looking very bored. "Are you coming, 'Léna, or not? I suppose you don't want to be kept standing in the sun."
"Oh, we're all used to that," said Rose. "I have three new freckles that I owe to Mrs. Washington and Caro Folsom. They called yesterday and kept me standing in the sun exactly three quarters of an hour before they made up their minds to come in and stay ten minutes."
"I'd like to go—"
Mrs. Cartright returned, shaking her head.
"Don Roberto does not want to be left alone," she said. "I fortunately thought of a most wonderful remedy for colds, and I have also been telling him about a terrible cold General Lee had once when he was staying with us. He did look so funny, dear great man, with his head tied up in one of old Aunt Sally's bandannas—"