"I declare I shall suffocate! Pray take it down."
"I won't! Why should I? Sit behind there; or go round to the front of the house. You'll get it all to yourself."
"Really--Mrs Wilkie--but what else can one expect?" and she sighed with contemptuous resignation.
Mrs Wilkie bridled, with a little snort, moved her stool an inch or two nearer, and held the umbrella in provoking proximity to Mrs Naylor's eye.
"These promiscuous gatherings are dreadful," moaned Mrs Naylor. "This is the reward one may expect for not taking care whom we allow to slide into our intimacy." Then, in a very superior tone, she added, "I must beg of you to put down that umbrella."
"You may beg till you're tired, ma'am; my umbrelly is going to stay as it is. To hear some people, out of little, country, back-door settlements! Ye would not think that it was a shanty among the stumps, they lived in at home. The pint of an umbrelly needn't trouble them so much. Does she think people are to be put about by sich as she? Her and her daughter setting up to trifle with gentlemen of intelleck and poseetion, forsooth! Yes, ma'am, ye may look! and be as mad as ye like. It's shame ye should be thinking of yourself and your girls--two sassy, underhand, designing brats!"
"My good woman, what can you possibly know about me and my daughters? Were you ever in your life under the same roof with gentlefolks, before you came to Clam Beach?"
Mrs Wilkie grew hot with indignation to hear herself addressed as a "good woman." It is a mystery to the male mind why this should be so, but it is undeniable that when one lady is minded to put the last indignity upon another, she speaks of her as a "woman." The only analogous trait--and we commend it to those with a turn for natural history--appears in coloured circles, where, as the most crushing retort in a scolding-match, the disputants are wont to apostrophise each other as "you black nigger." But this is digression.
Mrs Wilkie grew hot and indignant at being called a woman. It confused and silenced her. The thread of her ideas was broken, and she was not equal to a prompt rejoinder. But she was not going to give in on that account--being, indeed, more angry than before. It was to avenge a slight to her son that she had started on the war-path, and now the insult to herself added fuel to her wrath. She pressed her lips tightly together, and moved closer to Mrs Naylor, as the readiest way of being provoking.
"Where are you crushing to?" cried the other. "Would you force me into Mrs Petty's lap?" and then, after a pause, "unmannerly woman!" This time the word failed of its effect. "Woman" used as a missile is no better than a bomb-shell or a torpedo. It goes off but once. It passed unheeded, and Mrs Wilkie rejoined--