Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/115

 Revenge is sweet, and now his wife said sweetly, “Bert, you quite forgot to mention those flannel pajamas your sister sent you.”

“Flannel!” shrieked Tom. “Outrageous! Red?”

“No, sir, not red. Moonlight on the lake, stitched with old gold.”

“But flannel! Why, Bert, that’s a gift for an octogenarian, for lean and slippered age,—‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’”

“Go on,” wailed his victim, “pour vitriol in my wounds.”

“No, my decrepit flannel-scourged brother, I can’t consistently do that, because, you see, we’ve some woolly woes of our own to bear,” dragging them from their lair and waving them aloft as he sang,

When Mary’s eyes fell upon the black-and-purple disturber of the peace, her glee struck me as little short of fiendish. I hate to see such malevolence in a woman; though she said tenderly enough, “What a shame, Katharine! I thought only real old ladies wore such things!”

“Oh, you did? Which only shows, madam, that you are living back in the Oregon hills; no doubt, young girls are now wearing these at their coming-out parties.”