saying it! And I reckon they've got a pretty rummy old Pa--if the truth
was only known."

Pa's grin, if possible, stretched wider. Again that terrible chuckle,
which suggested a derangement of his internal parts, or the running-down
of an overwound clock, wheezed across the startled air.

"Maybe," Pa said, with some unpardonable complacency. "Maybe."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Jenny. She could not be sure, when his manner
returned to one of vacancy, and when the kitchen was silent, whether Pa
and she had really talked thus, or whether she had dreamed their talk.
To her dying day she was never sure, for Pa certainly added nothing to
the conversation thereafter. Was it real? Or had her too excited brain
played her a trick? Jenny pinched herself. It was like a fairy tale, in
which cats talk and little birds humanly sing, or the tiniest of fairies
appear from behind clocks or from within flower-pots. She looked at Pa
with fresh awe. There was no knowing where you had him! He had the
interest, for her, of one returned by miracle from other regions,
gifted with preposterous knowledges.... He became at this instant
fabulous, like Rip Van Winkle, or the Sleeping Beauty ... or the White
Cat....

In her perplexity Jenny fell once more into a kind of dream, an
argumentative dream. She went back over the earlier rows, re-living
them, exaggerating unconsciously the noble unselfishness of her own acts
and the pointed effectiveness of her speeches, until the scenes were
transformed. They now appeared in other hues, in other fashionings. This
is what volatile minds are able to do with all recent happenings
whatsoever, re-casting them in form altogether more exquisite than the