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enough.

Chapter 3
    She could not move, not even to shake one skinny finger at him; she couldn’t talk except when it pleased him to permit her that privilege, which was rarely. But short of actually putting her into pseudocoma, there was no way that Lincoln Parradyne Smith the 39th could dull the red rage that glowed in the eyes of Granny Gableframe, and he didn’t consider the coma justified by the situation. In fact, he found himself admiring the amount of hate the old lady managed to express without word or motion. There was an ancient saying-”If looks could kill . . .”-and it surely applied here. He’d seen some looks in his time, but this one was spectacular, even for a Granny.
    “You might just as well stop glaring at me like that, my dear Granny Gableframe,” he’d told her. From the very beginning. “I’m not impressed,” he’d said, “not in any way, not to any degree. You may glare at me all day and all night-all you are going to get from it is a headache.” It hadn’t discouraged her any.
    Lincoln Parradyne didn’t mind, though he didn’t look forward to the moment when he would have to turn her loose and put up with her tongue-lashing.
    “How long can you keep her like that?”
    Lincoln Parradyne glanced at the man that stood beside him, wondering if he could be serious, and sure enough he appeared to be, and so he shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows and said, “Till she dies, if I like.”
    “Well, I don’t want her dying,” objected Delldon Mallard Smith the 2nd, “whether you like or not!” And all three of his brothers, standing round the Granny’s bed, indicated that they strongly agreed with that sentiment.
    The Magician of Rank asked himself, from time to time, which one of the four Smith brothers was the stupidest. Delldon Mallardthe 2nd was the biggest; Whitney Crawford the 14th was the handsomest; Leroy Fortnight the 23rd was the fattest; and it appeared that the most cowardly of the set was Hazeltine Everett the 11th. But for stupidity, it was hard to choose among them, and the fact that they were his blood kin was a heavy burden to him.
    “You hear me, now?” demanded Delldon Mallard. “I want no misunderstanding. That’s our Granny and we love her, and if it just happens that she can’t quite be brought to go along with what’s needful without a certain amount of pressure being applied, all right; but she’s just an old lady and she’s frail, and I don’t want-”
    Lincoln Parradyne was completely out of patience. The man would ramble on for half an hour if he wasn’t stopped, and all of it nonsense.
    “I don’t want to hear what you don’t want,” he said tiredly. “I have no interest in what you don’t want! Your requirements were quite clearly specified, Delldon Mallard-you wanted Granny Gableframe in a state where she could not interfere with your plans, and I’ve provided you that. If she were one of the servingmaids, I could also have seen to it that her condition wasn’t marred by . . . irritation. But this is a Granny, cousin, not a dithering girlchild.”
    Leroy Fortnight snorted from the foot of the bed, where he was alternately kicking the bedpost with his boot and punching it with his fist.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked, snickering. “Isn’t your magic good enough to keep her down? One little old scrawny woman?”
    “I don’t believe I’d talk to Lincoln Parradyne like that,” hazarded one of the others. “Not unless you fancy him laying you out the same way as the Granny. You think you’d like that, Leroy Fortnight?”
    Delldon Mallard cleared his throat. “That,” he said firmly, “would . . . uh . . . be illegal. Il legal.”
    “Do you suppose,” marveled the Magician of Rank, staring at the big man with true astonishment, “that what I’ve done to Granny Gableframe isn’t illegal?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Well? Well? ”
    “I don’t really think so,” said Delldon Mallard. He was the oldest, and Master of