But he would have that
old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the
new dining-room. You remember it--a table and a watermelon sliced
open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with
two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-
store years and years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any
they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's
horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I
caught Bobby Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too,
with Bobby, and then told papa she agreed with him about its being
such a fine thing, and said he did just right to insist on having it
where he wanted it. She makes me tired! Sibyl!"
Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to
awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her
full gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her
denunciation of her sister-in-law.
"SIBYL!" she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed
to strike fire on her lips. "I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't
have married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good!
He could have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now,
and Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but
instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some
awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic
City, last spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even
HEARD of 'em!"
"I thought you were great friends with Sibyl," Bibbs said.
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