Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would have said, right along. "A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess." "Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said Mrs. Lapham. "I presume you'll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain't so young any more." She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,--none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong,--and the girl handed it to her father. "Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean that you're going to build over there?" "Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea. "I don't believe you do," pursued the girl. "Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me. Your mother does." He said DOOS, of course. Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't see any use in not enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy. That's what it's for, I suppose; though you mightn't always think so." She had a slow, quaint way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from being nasal that it was a little hoarse. "I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father. "How would it do to let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into the new house?" At times the Colonel's grammar failed him. The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way, his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing. III. TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the representative of the journal had visited. "It must be his friend," said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought the paper; "the one he's staying with."
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