The voice of her daughter answered, half-indifferently, from the next room.
"Why don't you come when I call you?" Anger now mingled with fretfulness.
The face of a girl in her seventeenth year, on which sat no very amiable expression, was presented at the door.
"Is that your opera cloak lying across the chair, and partly on the floor?"
Phoebe, without answering, crossed the room, and catching up the garment with as little carefulness as if it had been an old shawl threw it across her arm, and was retiring, when her mother said, sharply,—
"Just see how you are rumpling that cloak! What do you mean?"
"I'm not hurting the cloak, mother," answered Phoebe, coolly. Then, with a shade of reproof, she added, "You fret yourself for nothing."
"Do you call it nothing to abuse an elegant garment like that?" demanded Mrs. Caldwell. "To throw it upon the floor, and tumble it about as if it were an old rag?"
"All of which, mother mine, I have not done." And the girl tossed her head with an air of light indifference.
"Don't talk to me in that way, Phoebe! I'll not suffer it. You are forgetting yourself." The mother spoke with a sternness of manner that caused her daughter to remain silent. As they stood looking at each other, Mrs. Caldwell said, in a changed voice,—