“Me a wild beast! Me of no consequence! I should like,” cried Julia, with her eyes blazing like red-hot flames, and her fingers clasping and unclasping, “just to give it you hot, for once! just to stamp upon you, and tear off your fal-lals and pitch you out of the window!”
Janet nodded her head at each threat, not by way of approbation, but of acquiescence as in an argument she had foreseen.
“I know,” she said, “I told you so. It would be a great saving of time if you would consider all that sort of thing as said, and come to the real question.”
“What is the real question?” said Julia, staring, with her hands grasping the top of the chair on which she had been requested to sit down—whether because she was checked in her childish rage, or whether because she meant to use it as a weapon, it was difficult to say.
“The real question is, whether we are to be able to get on together or not. It’s the only one of any importance. I want to come to that.”
“What an awful fool you must be,” said Julia, bending over the back of the chair towards Janet with flaming looks of wrath.
“Yes,” said Janet. “One of us is so, that is very evident: but why should it strike you at this moment?”
“To think that it isn’t settled already, to think I would ever give in to you for a moment. Knuckle under! me! Oh! you think you can come over me with smiling, when you are in as blue a funk—— You, a bit of a governess hired just like the housemaid: and that’s exactly what mamma will say.”
Janet yawned a little in the girl’s furious face, a gentle little yawn which did not at all distort her own countenance.
“My poor child,” she said, “if you would only consider that I understand all that, and that we’d so much better come to business! You can’t frighten me, and though, of course, you can insult me, that’s of equally little use, for I don’t care.”