The Madigans

"Split dear, will you please button me?"

A look of outraged astonishment at the unheard-of endearment came over Irene's face. The Madigans regarded demonstrative affection as pure affectation at its best; at its worst it was little short of indecent.

"'Split dear?'" mocked Irene as soon as she recovered. "Yes, dear. Turn around, dear. Stand straight, dear. Wait a minute, dear--"

Sissy stood in silence, biting her tongue that she might not speak. She was so occupied with the desire to keep Number 10 of her compact with herself that she did not notice how long it was before Irene really began to button her waist. She did note, though, that she began at the bottom, a proceeding Split fancied merely because it drove her junior nearly frantic. She buttoned with maddening slowness up to the middle, when she capriciously left this point and recommenced at the top.

Mentally Sissy followed the operation. It was almost complete when through the little gap purposely left open Split deftly introduced a providentially flattened piece of ice from the window-sill, giving her victim a little shake that sent the ice slipping smoothly down her squirming body, but escaping before Sissy could turn and rend her.

"That settles Number 10," said Sissy, grimly, to herself, while she danced with discomfort. "I'll kill her if I get a chance--that's what I'll do. I'll get even, or my name's not Sis Madigan."

She hurried back into her room, which the twins shared, and stood in damp martyrdom while Bessie's butter-fingers crept with miserable slowness up and down. She suffered so from Bessie's ineptness that, despite the requirements of Number 3 of her code, she tore herself violently from her and turned her back imploringly to Florence. But Fom was a partizan of Split's, and it was against all the ethics of Madigan warfare to aid and comfort the enemy. When Sissy, chastened, returned to Bep's ministrations, the blonde one of the twins was so hurt and offended by the implication of awkwardness--a point upon which she was as vulnerable as she was sensitive--that Sissy slapped them both before she went at last for relief to Aunt Anne.

This was fatal, as she knew it would be.

"I shall tell your father about Irene," her aunt said, looking up from the coffee she was sipping as she lay in bed reading a French book. "But it's just as well, for I told you yesterday that that dress was too dirty to wear another day. Change it now--"

"Oh, Aunt Anne, it's late already--"

"You'll change that dress, Sissy, or you won't go to school."

"I won't! It's too late. I'll be late. That means one credit off, and this month I'm going--" A remembrance of her lofty intentions came suddenly to Sissy. All the world seemed bent on compelling her to forswear herself.

"Cecilia!" commanded Miss Madigan.

Sissy stiffened.

"You've disturbed my reading enough this morning. If you say another word I'll--"

"Oh, Aunt Anne--"

"Go over to the wall, Cecilia, and stand with your back to me for five minutes."

With a fiendish light in her eye--a light of such desperate satisfaction as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved toward the sensitive-plant in the window.

"Not there! That poor plant seems to suffer sympathetically with your badness. Stand over by the bureau."

Sissy obeyed. Her rage at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made commandments.

She was standing with her nose pressed firmly against the green wall-paper, her back laid open as by a surgical operation, and a towel, which her aunt had forced into the aperture for drying purposes, dangling down behind, when Kate, passing the door on her way to breakfast, glanced in.

Her sputtering, quickly stifled screech of laughter sent Sissy spinning about as a bull does when the banderilla is planted in his quivering flesh. She looked at the doorway; it was empty, but she heard scurrying footsteps without. Kate was on her way to tell the others.

She looked at Aunt Anne. That severe lady had dropped her book and, seized by the contagion, was shaking with silent laughter.

Not a word did Sissy say. Her expression of disgust,--disgust that a grown-up should be so silly as to see something funny in absolutely nothing; disgust that her aunt should so weaken the effect of her own discipline,--reinforced by the green smudge on her nose, rubbed off the wall-paper, finished Miss Madigan. The lady no longer attempted to conceal the disgraceful fact that she was laughing. She gave an audible gurgle, and began to wipe the tears of enjoyment from her eyes.

In that moment the iron entered into Sissy Madigan's soul. She turned again to the wall, and taking a pin which had fastened the bow of ribbon at her throat, she pricked slowly but relentlessly in the loose wall-paper this legend: