My heart had been going lower and lower.  So he knew Bella, and he knew I was not Bella, although he had not grasped the fact that I was usurping her place.  The odious Harbison man sat on the table and swung his feet.

“I wonder if you know,” he said, looking around him, “how good it is to see a white woman so perfectly at home in a civilized kitchen again, after two years of food cooked by a filthy Indian squaw over a portable sheet-iron stove!”

So perfectly at home?  I stood in the middle of the room and stared around at the copper things hanging up and the rows of blue and white crockery, and the dozens and hundreds of complicated-looking utensils, whose names I had never even heard, and I was dazed.  I tried with some show of authority to instruct Flannigan about gathering up the soiled things, and, after listening in puzzled silence for a minute, he stripped off his blue coat with a tolerant smile.

“Lave em to me, miss,” he said.  The “miss” passed unnoticed.  “I mayn’t give em a Turkish bath, which is what you are describin’, but I’ll get the grease off all right.  I always clean up while the missus is in bed with a young un.”

He rolled up his sleeves, found a brown checked gingham apron behind the door, and tied it around his neck with the ease of practice.  Then he cleared off the plates, eating what appealed to him as he did so, and stopping now and again for a deep-throated chuckle.

“I’m thinkin’,” he said once, stopping with a dish in the air, “what a deuce of a noise there will be when the vaccination doctor comes around this mornin’.  In a week every one of us will be nursin’ a sore arm or walkin’ on one leg, beggin’ your pardon, miss.  The last time the force was vaccinated, I asked to be done behind me ear; I needed me legs and I needed me arms, but didn’t need me head much!”

He threw his head back and laughed.  Mr. Harbison laughed.  Oh, we were very cheerful!  And that awful stove stared at me, and the kettle began to hum, and Aunt Selina sent down word that she was not well, and would like some omelet on her tray.  Omelet!

I knew that it was made of eggs, but that was the extent of my knowledge.  I muttered an excuse and ran upstairs to Anne, but she was still sniffling over her necklace, and said she didn’t know anything about omelets and didn’t care.  Food would choke her.  Neither of the Mercer girls knew either, and Bella, who was still reading in the den, absolutely declined to help.

“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.  You can get yourself out, as you got yourself in,” she said nastily.  “The simplest thing, if you don’t mind my suggesting it, is to poison the coffee and kill the lot of us.  Only, if you decide to do it, let me know; I want to live just long enough to see Jimmy Wilson writhe!”

Bella is the kind of person who gets on one’s nerves.  She finds a grievance and hugs it; she does ridiculous things and blames other people.  And she flirts.