The Inlaid Box

"Matilda Starr! 'Tain't no such thing!"

Matilda shrugged her shoulders with an air of finality. "All right," she returned, with cold sarcasm, "as long as you see it and I didn't."

"'Beauty has been the power of the ages,'" Grandmother continued, taking refuge once more in The Household Guardian. "'Cleopatra and Helen of Troy changed the map of the world by their imperial loveliness.'"

"I didn't know imps was lovely," Matilda remarked, frowning at the result of her labours. "I reckon I'll have to set a piece in at the corner, where it's puckerin'."

"Ain't I always told you that the only way to mend a three-cornered tear was to set a piece in? Some folks never get old enough to learn anything. Even Frank's wife would have known better'n that."

Cleopatra

"Never mind Frank's wife," returned Matilda, somewhat hurriedly. "Let her rest in her grave and go on readin' about the lovely imps."

"It doesn't say imps is lovely. It says 'imperial loveliness.'"

"Well, ain't that the same thing?"

"No, it ain't. Imperial means empire."

"Then why ain't it spelled so? Imperial begins with an i and so does imp, and, accordin' to what I learned when I went to school, empire begins with an e."

There seemed to be no adequate reply to this, so Grandmother went on: "If Cleopatra's nose had been an inch longer, where would Egypt have been now?"