“I think this world is a kind of single-threaded machine, after all.  There’s always something either too tight or too loose the minute you double,” she said, changing her tension-screw as she spoke.  “No; we’ve just got to make it up with cracker-frolics, the best way we can; and that takes one more of somebody’s nine dollars, every time.  There’s some fun in it, after all, especially to see Matilda Meane come to the table.  I do believe that girl would sell her soul if she could have a Parker House dinner every day.  When it’s a little worse, or a little better than usual, when the milk gives out, or we have a yesterday’s lobster for tea,—­I wish you could just see her.  She’s so mad, or she’s so eager.  She will have claw-meat; it is claw-meat with her, sure enough; and if anybody else gets it first, or the dish goes round the other way and is all picked over,—­she looks!  Why, she looks as if she desired the prayers of the congregation, and nobody would pray!”

“What are you two laughing at?” broke in Kate Sencerbox, leaning over from her table beyond.  “Bel Bree, where are your crimps?”

In the ardor of her work, or talk, or both, Bel’s hair, as usual, had got pushed recklessly aside.

“O, I only have a little smile in my hair early in the morning,” replies quick, cheery Bel.  “It never crimps decidedly, and it all gets straightened out prim enough as the day’s work comes on.  It’s like the grass of the field, and a good many other things; in the morning it is fresh and springeth up; in the evening it giveth up, and is down flat.”

“I guess you’ll find it so,” said Elise Mokey, splenetically.

“Was that what you were laughing at?” asked Kate.  “Seems to me you choose rather aggravating subjects.”

“Aggravations are as good as anything to laugh at, if you only know how,” Bel Bree said.

“They’re always handy, at any rate,” said Elise.

“I thought ‘aggravate’ meant making worse than it is,” said quiet little Mary Pinfall.

“Just it, Molly!” answered Bel Bree, quick as a flash.  “Take a plague, make it out seven times as bad as it is, so that it’s perfectly ridiculous and impossible, and then laugh at it.  Next time you put your finger on it, as the Irishman said of the flea, it isn’t there.”

“That’s hommerpathy,” said Miss Proddle.  “Hommerpathy cures by aggravating.”

Miss Proddle was tiresome; she always said things that had been said before, or that needed no saying.  Miss Proddle was another of those old girls who, like Miss Bree among the young ones, have outlived and lost their Christian names, with their vivacity.  Never mind; it is the Christian name, and the Lord knows them by it, as He did Martha and Mary.

“Reductio ad absurdum,” put in Grace Toppings, who had been at a High School, and studied geometry.

“Grace Toppings!” called out Kate Sencerbox, shortly, “you’ve stitched that flounce together with a twist in it!”