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 dodged it, very much as if that lady had hurled at her the silver-backed hair brush she held in her hand.

"Why," she exclaimed with an air of injured innocence; "nothing has got into me. I was just taking one last look at the California papers, and it made me homesick."

She made a gesture toward a pile of papers that surrounded her chair. Mrs. Mitchell paused and cerebrated. Somewhere about two o'clock of the afternoon, Bessie had stepped to the telephone.

"Send me up the last week of San Francisco and Los Angeles papers," she ordered.

The papers came. She went through the Los Angeles papers first, turning their pages casually, with occasional comments to her mother. And then she started the San Francisco file, scanning this time more swiftly and more casually until upon the very last of them she became suddenly absorbed in uncommunicative silence; after which the musings and the sighings had begun, followed by this absurd proposal, this passionate outburst, and this deadlock of the two women behind entrenchments of newspapers on the one hand and barricades of trunks upon the other.

As between her strong-willed daughter and her strong-willed self, Mrs. Mitchell knew that she generally emerged defeated. So far now she had been defeated—at least to the extent of an armistice. The packers had been stopped, while the argument went on.

But in the meantime Mrs. Mitchell was violating the rules of war by bringing up reinforcements. Mr. Mitchell was on his way over from the Monadnock Building. He would soon settle Miss Bessie; that is, if he did not make a cowardly and instant surrender, because Mrs. Mitchell knew well enough he would rather sit on the rear platform of his private car and watch the miles of steel and