"_You_ know, Florence," he said, "it only means acting like _you_ most always do." He applauded himself with a burst of changing laughter ranging from a bullfrog croak to a collapsing soprano; then he added: "Espeshually when you come around my and Henry's Newspaper Building! You cert'nly 'lose your reason' every time you come around _that_ ole place!" "Well, course I haf to act like the people that's already there," Florence retorted, not sharply, but in a musing tone that should have warned him. It was not her wont to use a quiet voice for repartee. Thinking her humble, he laughed the more raucously. "Oh, Florence!" he besought her. "Say not so! Say not so!" "Children, children!" Uncle Joseph remonstrated. Herbert changed his tone; he became seriously plaintive. "Well, she does act that way, Uncle Joseph! When she comes around there you'd think we were runnin' a lunatic asylum, the way she takes on. She hollers and bellers and squalls and squawks. The least little teeny thing she don't like about the way we run our paper, she comes flappin' over there and goes to screechin' around you could hear her out at the Poor House Farm!" "Now, now, Herbert," his Aunt Fanny interposed. "Poor little Florence isn't saying anything impolite to you--not right now, at any rate. Why don't you be a little sweet to her just for once?" Her unfortunate expression revolted all the manliness in Herbert's bosom. "Be a little _sweet_ to her?" he echoed with poignant incredulity, and then in candour made plain how poorly Aunt Fanny inspired him. "I just exackly as soon be a little sweet to an alligator," he said. "Oh, oh!" said Aunt Carrie. "I would!" Herbert insisted. "Or a mosquito. I'd rather, to _either_ of 'em, 'cause anyway they don't make so much noise. Why, you just ought to _hear_ her," he went on, growing more and more severe. "You ought to just come around our Newspaper Building any afternoon you please, after school, when Henry and I are tryin' to do our work in anyway _some_ peace. Why, she just squawks and squalls and squ----" "It must be terrible," Uncle Joseph interrupted. "What do you do all that for, Florence, every afternoon?" "Just for exercise," she answered dreamily; and her placidity the more exasperated her journalist cousin. "She does it because she thinks _she_ ought to be runnin' our own newspaper, my and Henry's; that's why she does it! She thinks she knows more about how to run newspapers than anybody alive; but there's one thing she's goin' to find out; and that is, she don't get anything _more_ to do with my and Henry's newspaper. We wouldn't have another single one of her ole poems in it, no matter how much she offered to pay us! Uncle Joseph, I think you ought to _tell_ her she's got no business around my and Henry's Newspaper Building." "But, Herbert," Aunt Fanny suggested;--"you might let Florence have a little share in it of some sort. Then everything would be all right."