"If it makes you feel bad to have me cross," Patty said one morning, in answer to a remonstrance of Flossy's, "think how much worse it is for me to be cross. I have to endure my own company all the time, you know." "Well, Patty-pat," Flossy answered meditatively, "be happy and you'll be virtuous. And that reminds me of Bathalina's room. Don't you think that when it's papered--aunt Britann, didn't you say it was to be done this week?--it might have a frieze, or a dado, or something, of mottoes?" "Of mottoes?" "Yes. I've thought up some lovely ones. 'A woman is known by the company she forsakes' is a good one. Then, 'The early bird dreads the fire,'--you know how she hates to get up and build the fire." "Water is more her element," said Will. "Can't you have-- 'Bonnet and feather She'll wash together!' or something of that kind?" "Oh, no! That isn't good. 'Be virtuous and you'll be disagreeable' might do; and 'Marry in haste, and separate at leisure.' I'll think up plenty of mottoes, aunt Britann, if you'll have them put on her walls." "There comes her aunt Thomas Jefferson Gooch, at your service," Will said, glancing from the window. "There must be a storm in the air to bring her over so early." He was right. Mrs. Gooch had come over to remonstrate with her niece upon her relations to her husband. "I couldn't rest, Bathalina," she said, "after hearing that that unfacalized critter was round here again, for I knew just what a fool you be. And it ain't no way respectable to have an intermittent husband, always comin' an' goin,' like the old woman's soap. 'Tain't what our folks has been used to. He's got all your money, hain't he? I'm sure I don't see what more he wants. You let him have every copper you had in the bank, I'll be bound." "Well," retorted Mrs. Mixon, "what if I did? I put that money by for a rainy day, didn't I? an' when it come, I spent it." "Lawful sakes! I hope you didn't put it by for Peter Mixin's rainy days! As I told your cousin Huldy, he's one of them folks that makes a dreadful cheerful funeral." "Dear me!" exclaimed Bathalina, in her confusion wetting her finger, and putting it to the water in the boiler to see if it were hot enough to sizzle, like a hot iron. "How confusin' you are, aunt Jeff! '_Restless_ mortals toil for nought,' as the hymn says; and you're one of 'em." "I should think I was!" retorted aunty Jeff. "But I tell you ours is a respectable family, and such culch as Peter Mixup was never brought into it before; to say nothing of having a husband bobbing after you like the tail of a kite, now here and now there!" "Gracious!" exclaimed her niece fiercely. "How you go on! Don't get me mad, or my sinful pride'll be too much for me." "Sinful fiddlesticks! If you had any pride, you wouldn't have that rag-tag-and-bobtail, Tom-Dick-and-Harry sort of a husband round you!" "I shall go mad!" cried Bathalina, with an awful shrillness in her tones. "You'll make me go a raving lunacy!"