"All that?" And round chin on pink palm, she fell to studying me with as much curiosity as if she had just met me and were puzzled to get at the real Me. Then she nodded, and snatching a sheet of paper, began to figure again, pausing every now and then to regard me with slitted eyes. At the end of ten strenuous minutes she pushed the paper over to me, and watched me grow all but apoplectic as I studied it. It was an entertaining list, beginning with a hat and ending with silk stockings. With all sorts of wonderful things in between--for me, you understand. Things like "One brown frock, with something cloudy-yellow about it." ("Sophy, blondes can stand yellow wonderfully well; I suggest a bronze, instead of a duller brown.") "Why, I have plenty of clothes!" I protested. "Business-woman-of-a-certain-age, general-utility, will-stand-wear-and-tear clothes. Not a stitch of Hyndshousey clothes among them. No _happy_, glad-I'm-alive-and-a woman clothes. Here's where you cease to look merely useful, respectable, and responsible, and begin to look the Lady of the Castle. There's quite as much philosophy and good morals in looking like a butterfly as there is in resembling a caterpillar." "_Why_ should I have more clothes?" I demanded. "Because." And she added, with a fleeting smile, "And then catch your hare." "Alicia!" said I, scandalized. "Alicia Gaines, do you realize I am thirty-six years old?" "You wouldn't be if you just had sense enough to forget to remember it." This resentfully. "No? Would you mind telling me how I might become such an accomplished forgetter?" "Why, there's nothing easier! When you really wish to forget to remember something, Sophy, all you have to do is to remember to forget it!" And then, with real earnestness: "Sophy, it's the better part of wisdom to look like the job you want to hold down. Your job is holding down Hynds House. And we are up against things, Sophy, you and I. We have got to win out because it means--all this." Her eyes swept over the beautiful old room with an immense pride and affection. "We have just _got_ to keep Hynds House, if only to teach these Hyndsville women a lesson." She spoke after a pause. "Sophy, they flatten their ears and arch their backs at sight of us; and whenever there's a good chance for a wipe of a paw, why, we catch it across the nose. Now I," she admitted frankly, "am naturally full of cat feelings myself. I will not do what _you_ want to do--walk off looking aggrieved, after the fashion of Old Dog Tray. I will repay in kind, retaliate in true lady-cat manner. And these,"--she began to smile--"these shall be our weapons of offense and defense. It will be a gorgeous struggle; however, my forebears came from Kilkenny!"