Bessie's lip was full and ripe when she pouted and her voice was freighted heavily with protest and appeal. How pretty her eyelids were when there was a tear quivering on the lashes like a ball of quicksilver. And how really enchanting she looked, as with hair a bit disheveled and color heightening, she went on to argue impetuously:
"What's the good of having a private car? What's the good of being a vice-president's wife and daughter, if you can't change your mind and go galloping out to California when you feel like it? Back to your own home! Back to your own people! Back where the scenery is the grandest in the world! Back where the sky is high enough that you don't have to shoulder the zenith out of the way in the morning so that you can stand up straight and take a full breath."
"Bessie Mitchell!" exclaimed her mother at this juncture, turning on her offspring accusingly. "What has got into you? Something has! You're up to something. What is it?"
Bessie brooked her mother's discerning glance and then dodged it, very much as if that lady had hurled at her the silver-backed hair brush she held in her hand.
"Why," she exclaimed with an air of injured innocence; "nothing has got into me. I was just taking one last look at the California papers, and it made me homesick."
She made a gesture toward a pile of papers that surrounded her chair. Mrs. Mitchell paused and cerebrated. Somewhere about two o'clock of the afternoon, Bessie had stepped to the telephone.
"Send me up the last week of San Francisco and Los Angeles papers," she ordered.
The papers came. She went through the Los Angeles papers first, turning their pages casually, with occasional comments to her mother. And then she started the San Francisco file, scanning this time more swiftly and more casually until upon the very last of them she became suddenly absorbed in uncommunicative silence; after which the musings and the sighings had begun, followed by this absurd proposal, this passionate outburst, and this deadlock of the two women behind entrenchments of newspapers on the one hand and barricades of trunks upon the other.
As between her strong-willed daughter and her strong-willed self, Mrs. Mitchell knew that she generally emerged defeated. So far now she had been defeated—at least to the extent of an armistice. The packers had been stopped, while the argument went on.
But in the meantime Mrs. Mitchell was violating the rules of war by bringing up reinforcements. Mr. Mitchell was on his way over from the Monadnock Building. He would soon settle Miss Bessie; that is, if he did not make a cowardly and instant surrender, because Mrs. Mitchell knew well enough he would rather sit on the rear platform of his private car and watch the miles of steel and cinder stream from under him for ten hours a day for the rest of his life than visit his native sod for five minutes.