“Are they nice?” inquired Sue, squatting in a rustic chair and swinging her legs, as she calmly surveyed her sister.
“Nice? Sue, they’re the funniest kids you ever heard of,” gasped Becky, her eagerness to talk stifling the spasms of merriment. “They ain’t New Yorkers—not a bit—they’re Bostoners! Think of that. It would kill you to hear ’em talk. They’re as full of culture as an egg is of meat; an’ langwidge!—say, folks, it’s something awful.”
“I guessed as much,” said Don, with a grin. “But, I’m glad they’re not our kind. I wouldn’t care to go over to our old house and play with the usurpers. Let’s shut ’em out, for good and all.”
“Oh, they’ll shut us out, I s’pect,” remarked Becky, wiping her eyes on her gingham sleeve. “You ought to have seen ’em stick up their noses at me till they found out I was a Daring. Then they put on so many airs it was disgust’n’.”
“Seems to me,” said Sue, shaking away her troublesome curls and looking thoughtfully at her sprawling, ungainly sister, “they’re ’zactly the sort we ought to ’sociate with. If you could rub a little culture off’n ’em, dear, it wouldn’t hurt you a bit.”
“Nor you, either, Sue,” laughed Don. “If you pronounced English that way in Boston, they’d jail you.”
“Now who’s a snob, Don?” asked Sue, indignantly. “No one’s s’posed to pernounce ev’ry measley letter the dicsh’naries chuck into a word, is they?”
“Oh, Sue!” said Becky; “your grammar is as bad as your pernunciation. I mus’ look afteh your education, myself. Those Randolph kids are a revelation to me; and, honest injun, I’m somewhat ashamed of myself. We’re going wrong, all of us, since mother died,” with a sigh and a catch in her voice, “an’ need to be jerked into line.”
She said this in sober earnestness, remembering the sweet, gentle mother who had labored so hard to keep her flock from straying, and whose loss had permitted them to wander as their natural, untamed instincts dictated.
“Mother,” said Don in tender accents, “was a lady to her finger tips, and wanted her girls and boys to grow up to be ladies and gentlemen. I try to do as she’d like to have me, whenever I think of it; but, that isn’t very often.”