Sometimes they even came to blows.
"I'll fetch your ma to you—that I will!" threatened Sarah, called by the noise of the scuffle. "Great girls like you—fightin' like bandicoots! You ought to be downright ashamed o' yourselves."
"I don't know what's come over you two, I'm sure," scolded Mother, when the combatants had been parted and brought before her in the kitchen, where she was rolling pastry. "You never used to go on like this.—Pin, stop that noise. Do you want to deafen me?"
"She hit me first," sobbed Pin. "It's always Laura who begins."
"I'll teach her to cheek me like that!"
"Well, all I can say is," said Mother exasperated, and pushed a lock of hair off her perspiring forehead with the back of her hand. "All I say is, big girls as you are, you deserve to have the nonsense whipped out of you.—As for you, Laura, if this is your only return for all the money I've spent on you, then I wish from my heart you'd never seen the inside of that Melbourne school."
"How pretty your eyes look, mother, when your eyelashes get floury!" said Laura, struck by the vivid contrast of black and white. She merely stated the fact, without intent to flatter, her anger being given to puffing out as suddenly as it kindled.
"Oh, get along with you!" said Mother, at the same time skilfully lifting and turning a large, thin sheet of paste. "You can't get round ME like that."
"You used to have nice, ladylike manners," she said on another occasion, when Laura, summoned to the drawingroom to see a visitor, had in Mother's eyes disgraced them both. "Now, you've no more idea how to behave than a country bumpkin. You sit there, like a stock or a stone, as if you didn't know how to open your mouth."—Mother was very cross.
"I didn't want to see that old frump anyhow," retorted Laura, who inclined to charge the inhabitants of the township with an extreme provinciality. "And what else was there to say, but yes or no? She asked me all things I didn't know anything about. You don't want me to tell stories, I suppose?"