Jenny could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa.  Emmy sometimes felt that.  She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the mantelpiece in her fierce hatred of his helplessness and his occasional perverse stupidity.  He was rarely stupid with Jenny, but giggled at her teasing.

Jenny was taller than Emmy by several inches.  She was tall and thin and dark, with an air of something like impudent bravado that made her expression sometimes a little wicked.  Her nose was long and straight, almost sharp-pointed; her face too thin to be a perfect oval.  Her eyes were wide open, and so full of power to show feeling that they seemed constantly alive with changing and mocking lights and shadows.  If she had been stouter the excellent shape of her body, now almost too thick in the waist, would have been emphasised.  Happiness and comfort, a decrease in physical as in mental restlessness, would have made her more than ordinarily beautiful.  As it was she drew the eye at once, as though she challenged a conflict of will:  and her movements were so swift and eager, so little clumsy or jerking, that Jenny had a carriage to command admiration.  The resemblance between the sisters was ordinarily not noticeable.  It would have needed a photograph—­because photographs, besides flattening the features, also in some manner “compose” and distinguish them—­to reveal the likenesses in shape, in shadow, even in outline, which were momentarily obscured by the natural differences of colouring and expression.  Emmy was less dark, more temperamentally unadventurous, stouter, and possessed of more colour.  She was twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine, and her mouth was rather too hard for pleasantness.  It was not peevish, but the lips were set as though she had endured much.  Her eyes, also, were hard; although if she cried one saw her face soften remarkably into the semblance of that of a little girl.  From an involuntary defiance her expression changed to something really pathetic.  One could not help loving her then, not with the free give and take of happy affection, but with a shamed hope that nobody could read the conflict of sympathy and contempt which made one’s love frigid and self-conscious.  Jenny rarely cried:  her cheeks reddened and her eyes grew full of tears; but she did not cry.  Her tongue was too ready and her brain too quick for that.  Also, she kept her temper from flooding over into the self-abandonment of angry weeping and vituperation.  Perhaps it was that she had too much pride—­or that in general she saw life with too much self-complacency, or that she was not in the habit of yielding to disappointment.  It may have been that Jenny belonged to that class of persons who are called, self-sufficient.  She plunged through a crisis with her own zest, meeting