ion of each
new-comer so often and so faithfully that from conscious mimicry they
turned to use of it without quotation-marks, till, insensibly, at last
it was received into their vocabulary--which fact, by the way, made the
Madigan dialect at times difficult for strangers to master.

For instance, the rare rainy days in Nevada were always "glummy" among
Madigans, because the blonde twin had once been so affected by their
gloom that she spelled it that way. An over-credulous person was a
"sucher" since the day she had written it so. Jack Cody lived in the
"vikinty" of their house, because Bep Partington had so decreed. "Don't
greed" had become a classic since the day Aunt Anne issued her infamous
ukase, compelling that twin who (wilfully speculating upon her sister's
envy) kept goodies to the last to divide said last precious morsel with
the gloating other. And the Madigan who (taking base advantage of the
fact that Bep was at an age when to bite into a hard red winter apple
was to leave a shaky tooth behind) obligingly took the first bite, but
made that bite include nearly half the apple--that rapacious betrayer of
confiding helplessness deserved to be called a harpy. But she wasn't;
she was known as "a regular harper!"

The Madigans trooped back into the twins' room in a body to "trophy"
over Bep, whose double misfortune it was not only to be a Partington,
but to strenuously deny her kinship with the family of that name. Bessie
Madigan could not be got to admit that she had ever misused a word. And
though the expressions she coined became part of Madigan history, though
each piece was stamped undeniably by poor Bep her awkward mark, she
never ceased insisting that they were counterfeit, issued for the
express purpose of discrediting her well-known familiarity with elegant
English.

Yet she it was who had first miscalled her shadow a "shabby"; who had
asked to be "merinded to merember," like her absent-minded Aunt Anne;
and who had unconsciously parodied Split's passionate rendering of a
line of the old song, "I feel his presence near" into "I feel his
pleasant sneer"!

It was rarely that the Madigans could keep peace among themselves long
enough to make an onslaught in a body. But when they did, the lone
victim of their attack knew better than to struggle against her fate.
Poor Bep, her protests borne down, all her old sins of diction raked up
and, joined to the new ones, marshaled against her, became sulky. She