Bep blushed with mortification. "Don't you trophy over me, Fom Madigan!" she cried wrathfully. Sissy's giggle became a shout of laughter, and straightway she sallied forth, benightgowned as she was, to carry the news of Bep's latest to the Madigans--while Bep, aware that she had Partingtoned again, without knowing just how, cried furiously after her: "I didn't say it! I didn't!" Bep's talent was dear to the Madigans. They seized upon each blunder she made, and held it up, shrinking and bare, under the light of their laughter-loving eyes. They ridiculed it interminably, and were unflaggingly entertained by it, repeating it for the edification of each new-comer so often and so faithfully that from conscious mimicry they turned to use of it without quotation-marks, till, insensibly, at last it was received into their vocabulary--which fact, by the way, made the Madigan dialect at times difficult for strangers to master. For instance, the rare rainy days in Nevada were always "glummy" among Madigans, because the blonde twin had once been so affected by their gloom that she spelled it that way. An over-credulous person was a "sucher" since the day she had written it so. Jack Cody lived in the "vikinty" of their house, because Bep Partington had so decreed. "Don't greed" had become a classic since the day Aunt Anne issued her infamous ukase, compelling that twin who (wilfully speculating upon her sister's envy) kept goodies to the last to divide said last precious morsel with the gloating other. And the Madigan who (taking base advantage of the fact that Bep was at an age when to bite into a hard red winter apple was to leave a shaky tooth behind) obligingly took the first bite, but made that bite include nearly half the apple--that rapacious betrayer of confiding helplessness deserved to be called a harpy. But she wasn't; she was known as "a regular harper!" The Madigans trooped back into the twins' room in a body to "trophy" over Bep, whose double misfortune it was not only to be a Partington, but to strenuously deny her kinship with the family of that name. Bessie Madigan could not be got to admit that she had ever misused a word. And though the expressions she coined became part of Madigan history, though each piece was stamped undeniably by poor Bep her awkward mark, she never ceased insisting that they were counterfeit, issued for the express purpose of discrediting her well-known familiarity with elegant English. Yet she it was who had first miscalled her shadow a "shabby"; who had asked to be "merinded to merember," like her absent-minded Aunt Anne; and who had unconsciously parodied Split's passionate rendering of a line of the old song, "I feel his presence near" into "I feel his pleasant sneer"!