8

"But what a combination!" Aunt Hannah pointed out. "As sure as you're a living woman this mouth and chin are like Uncle Lancelot!—Think of it—Jacob Moore and Lancelot Christie living together in the same skin!"

"Why, they'll tear the child limb from limb!"

This piece of sarcasm came from old great-great-aunt, Patricia Christie, who never took sides with anybody in family disputes, because she hated them one and all alike. She rose from her chair now and hobbled on her stick into the midst of the battle-field.

"Let me see! Let me see!"

"She's remarkably like Uncle Lancelot, aunty," Cousin Pollie declared with a superior air of finality.

"She's a thousand times more like my father than I, myself, am," poor little mother avowed stanchly. 9

9

"Then, all I've got to say is that it's a devilish bad combination!" Aunt Patricia threw out, making faces at them impartially.

And to pursue the matter further, I may state that it was! All my life I have been divided between those ancient enemies—cut in two by a Solomon's sword, as it were, because no decision could be made as to which one really owned me.

You believe in a "dual personality"? Well, they're mine! They quarrel within me! They dispute! They pull and wrangle and seesaw in as many different directions as a party of Cook tourists in Cairo—coming into the council-chamber of my conscience to decide everything I do, from the selection of a black-dotted veil to the emancipation of the sex—while I sit by as helpless as a bound-and-gagged spiritual medium.

"They're not going to affect her future," mother said, but a little gasp of fear showed that if she'd been a Roman Catholic she would be crossing herself. 10

10

"Of course not!" Aunt Patricia answered. "It's all written down, anyhow, in her little hand. Let me see the lines of her palm!"

"Her feet's a heap cuter!" Guilford advised, but the old lady untwisted my tight little fist.

"Ah! This tells the story!"

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