He makes Molly slave for him." Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument.

It was plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother's perverse moods, and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said.

He called her "she," which was a proof of it.

She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation: "It's pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!" "Nobody WANTS to stick him into an office," she said.
She, too, was becoming annoyed.

She had spent the whole of the afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged, rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out somewhere, she didn't know and didn't mean to ask where, all the afternoon.
Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.
"The truth is," he observed gloomily, "that I ought to have accepted Uncle John's offer.