"By her being my grandmother's sister, Laura," Ralph kindly explained.
"Oh, no!" cried Laura impatiently. "I mean how she came to be so cross, and you not know her—you don't know her, do you?"
"Never saw the lady, never knew she had a granddaughter until this very night as now is," affirmed Ralph. "There isn't an interesting story; I'm sorry, for your sake, Laura, because you might write music for it. My great-aunt Lucinda seems to be a person troubled with chronic, all-round incompatibility. She quarreled with everybody belonging to her if they dared to have a mind of their own. Mother always said she had a grievance against the world because it revolved on its own axis. She never had a fuss with mother directly, but she fell out with her sister, mother's mother, when my mother was a little girl, and she wouldn't make up, not if the skies fell—or grandmother fell on her knees. Grandmother wasn't a bit like her—dear soul, grandmother was, and it worried her to be on the outs with her sister, but she could never coax her on the ins. And the gentle Lucinda included mother in her scrap, because mother was grandmother's daughter, and that's why we never knew her. Aunt Lucinda married this immensely wealthy Mr. Jones-Dexter, and after that, when grandmother was dead and mother a widow without much money, why she didn't like to try to patch up the row for fear Mrs. Jones-Dexter would misunderstand her motives. We knew Mr. Jones-Dexter died—he was too rich to die privately, so to speak—and we heard that Aunt Lucinda quarreled bitterly with her only son—couldn't make him marry the girl she had picked out—and he died 'way off somewhere. This little Serena must be his child. I wonder where the mother is? Aunt Lucinda must have taken her grandchild into favor."
"Into favor doesn't express it," said Margery. The girls had listened to this outline sketch of family history so intently as to endanger their feet and passers-by, in their oblivion to all else. "She is perfectly wrapped up in her, and her love for her is evidently her absorbing passion. She is so proud of her, so tender of her, looks so adoringly at her that you never saw anything like it! Really, I wish you could see your little cousin, Ralph, I can't do her justice."
"I'm not likely to see her," said Ralph. "Very likely Aunt Lucinda was sorry for driving her son off, especially as people say the girl he cared for was nice in every way, only she wasn't the one his mother had picked out. Probably she is conscience-stricken, as unjust, bad-tempered people are at the end, in story books, and she is making up to this little Serena for all her life-long injustice. Old age ought to count for a good deal, too; that seems to be something that makes the strongest will knuckle under."
"Mrs. Jones-Dexter must be dreadful," said Polly with conviction.
"She must have led a dreadful life," said Ralph kindly. "It must be pretty bad to have your shoulder bruised your whole life long from keeping chips on it all the time! I'd hate to spend seventy years on the home plate with my bat up, ready to hit any old ball, foul or fair. Look out, Happie! These are the elevated road stairs. You want to pick up your feet, my child!"
Happie laughed. Ralph had just saved her from falling, face downward, up the stairs. She was so interested in what he was saying that she had tripped on her own skirt and Laura's trailing umbrella.
"You needn't fumble for your pocket book, Margery. Bob gave me a strip of L tickets to bring you home. He's a terror on insisting on strict justice," said Ralph, producing a dark-pink jointed strip of pasteboard and dropping it whole into the ticket chopper's box. "I had precisely the right number for the crowd."
"And we always settle with Bob. Our car fares are part of the expenses of the tea room," said Margery. "We all believe in not being slovenly about such little items."