“Is there dumplings?” he quivered, seeming to tremble with excitement.

“One for you, Pa!” cried Emmy from the kitchen.  Pa gave a small chuckle of joy.  His progress was accelerated.  They reached the table, and Emmy took his right arm for the descent into a substantial chair.  Upon Pa’s plate glistened a fair dumpling, a glorious mountain of paste amid the wreckage of meat and gravy.  “And now, perhaps,” Emmy went on, smoothing back from her forehead a little streamer of hair, “you’ll close the door, Jenny....”

It was closed with a bang that made Pa jump and Emmy look savagely up.

“Sorry!” cried Jenny.  “How’s that dumpling, Pa?” She sat recklessly at the table.

v

To look at the three of them sitting there munching away was a sight not altogether pleasing.  Pa’s veins stood out from his forehead, and the two girls devoted themselves to the food as if they needed it.  There was none of the airy talk that goes on in the houses of the rich while maids or menservants come respectfully to right or left of the diners with decanters or dishes.  Here the food was the thing, and there was no speech.  Sometimes Pa’s eyes rolled, sometimes Emmy glanced up with unconscious malevolence at Jenny, sometimes Jenny almost winked at the lithograph portrait of Edward the Seventh (as Prince of Wales) which hung over the mantelpiece above the one-and-tenpenny-ha’penny clock that ticked away so busily there.  Something had happened long ago to Edward the Seventh, and he had a stain across his Field Marshal’s uniform.  Something had happened also to the clock, which lay upon its side, as if kicking in a death agony.  Something had happened to almost everything in the kitchen.  Even the plates on the dresser, and the cups and saucers that hung or stood upon the shelves, bore the noble scars of service.  Every time Emmy turned her glance upon a damaged plate, as sharp as a stalactite, she had the thought:  “Jenny’s doing.”  Every time she looked at the convulsive clock Emmy said to herself:  “That was Miss Jenny’s cleverness when she chucked the cosy at Alf.”  And when Emmy said in this reflective silence of animosity the name “Alf” she drew a deep breath and looked straight up at Jenny with inscrutable eyes of pain.

vi

The stew being finished, Emmy collected the plates, and retired once again to the scullery.  Now did Jenny show afresh that curiosity whose first flush had been so ill-satisfied by the meat course.  When, however, Emmy reappeared with that most domestic of sweets, a bread pudding, Jenny’s face fell once more; for of all dishes she most abominated bread pudding.  Under her breath she adversely commented.

“Oh lor!” she whispered.  “Stew and b.p.  What a life!”

Emmy, not hearing, but second sighted on such matters, shot a malevolent glance from her place.  In an awful voice, intended to be a trifle arch, she addressed her father.

“Bready butter pudding, Pa?” she inquired.  The old man whinnied with delight, and Emmy was appeased.  She had one satisfied client, at any rate.  She cut into the pudding with a knife, producing wedges with a dexterous hand.