"I'd like to give that alleged brain of yours a real massage, just for fun." Karen forced her emotion to subside to a mere seething rage, and Ladora watched her do it. "But since this whole stinking planet is my mother's dish, not mine, she'd blast me to a cinder--she's done it before--if I dip in." She cooled further--visibly. "At that, I don't suppose you're too bad an egg, in your own poisonous way--you just don't know any better. So maybe I'd better warn you, you poor fool, since you haven't got sense enough to see it, that you're playing with a live fuse when you push my mother around like you've been doing. About one more millimeter of it and she'll get mad--like I did a second ago except more so--and you'll wish to Klono you had never been born. She'll never make a sign until she blows up, but I'm telling you that she's as much harder and tougher than I am as she is older, and what she always does to people who cross her I wouldn't want to watch happen again, even to a snake. Want to know what she'll do to you first? She'll pick you up, curl you into a perfect circle, pull off your arms, shove both your legs down your throat to the knees, and roll you down that chute there into the ocean. After that I don't know what she'll do--depends on how much pressure she develops before she blows up. One thing, though, she's always sorry afterward--why, she even attends the funeral, sometimes, and insists on paying the expenses!" With which outrageous thought she kissed Clarrissa an enthusiastic good-by. "Told you I couldn't stay a minute. Got to do a flit--'see a man about a dog.' Came a million parsecs to squeeze you, Mums, but it was worth it. Clear ether!" She was gone; and it was a dewy-eyed and rapt mother, not a Lensman, who turned to the still completely disorganized Lyranian. Clarrissa had perceived nothing whatever of what had happened--Karen had very carefully seen to that. * * * * * "My daughter," Clarrissa mused, as much to herself as to Ladora. "One of four. The four dearest, finest, sweetest girls that ever lived. I often wonder how a woman of my limitations, of my faults, could possibly have borne such children." And Ladora of Lyrane, humorless and literal as all Lyranians are, took those thoughts at their face value and correlated their every connotation and implication with what she herself had perceived in that "dear, sweet" daughter's mind; with what that daughter had done and had said. The nature and quality of this hellish person's "limitations" and "faults" became eminently clear, and as she perceived what she thought was the truth, the Lyranian literally cringed.