With a finishing swirl of the big wooden spoon, the last drops of mush fell into grandfather’s bowl, while a sly and injured look appeared instantly on the face of his wife.  She was not hungry, but it annoyed her unspeakably that she should not be given the larger portion of food.  Her rheumatism was severer than her husband’s, and it seemed to her that this alone should have entitled her to the greater share of attention.  There was a fierce contempt in her manner when she alluded to his age or to his infirmities, for although he was three years her elder, he was still chirpy and cheerful, with many summers, as she said resentfully, left in him yet.

“Breakfast is ready, grannies,” remarked Sarah, who had allowed her coffee to grow cold while she looked after the others; “are you ready to eat?”

Grandmother’s sly little eyes slanted over her hooked nose in the direction of the two bowls which her daughter-in-law was about to sprinkle with sugar.  An idea entered her old head which made her chuckle with pleasure, and when her mush had been covered, she croaked out suddenly that she would take her breakfast unsweetened.  “I’m too bad to take sugar—­give that to him—­he has a stomach to stand it,” she said.  Though her mouth watered for sweets, by this trick she had outwitted grandfather, and she felt that it was better than sugar.

The kitchen was a large, comfortable room, with strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned flour barrels near the door.  The bright homespun carpet left a strip of bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts ready for storing.  A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines, were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size.  In Sarah’s straitened and intolerant soul a single passion had budded and expanded into fulfillment.  Stern to all mortal things, to flowers alone she softened and grew gentle.  From the front steps to the back, the kitchen was filled with them.  Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and blossom.  Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were clipped bare of bloom.  Many were the dead hands that had been laid in the earth clasping her lilies.  This thought had been for years the chief solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her contention.  After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June.  Her marriage had been a disappointment to her, for her husband, a pleasant, good-looking fellow, had turned out an idler; her children, with the exception of Archie, the youngest, had never filled the vacancy in her life; but in her devotion to flowers there was something of the ecstasy and all of the self-abandonment she had missed in her human relations.