Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/62

 of a knife he scraped and dug, pulling in flat lips against moss-green teeth.

Mrs. Bertrand watched him sullenly. The mess he made every night irritated her even more tonight than usual. She forgot it was at her insistence that he used the sink instead of soiling the bathroom upstairs. Why couldn't he wash at the factory? It was no secret Bert had wanted that Mae Welland. Stuck-up Mae Welland who made herself dresses like the rich customers of Bittner Sisters for whom she had sewed. A righteous gleam cricketed across her beetle eyes. She might not be such a swell dresser but she had held on to her man.

A sudden wave of disquiet made her dizzy. Kitchen must be too hot. Flat vapor from a pallid veal stew steamed as Mrs. Bertrand lifted the lid to drop in dumplings.

Mr. Bertrand looked up from his nail excavations and eyed the steaming pot. His forty-year-old figure already had the bent-knee droop of old age, a droop accelerated by truckling to employers at the factory where he was foreman. When he reached home, fortified by two glasses of beer, he had mustered a leaden mold of arrogance suitable to the head of a family.

His hank of a wife however knew how to hold him at bay with her needling remarks, for Mae Welland was a splinter in his memory—and hers. She opened the white oven door of the black gas stove and tested an Indian pudding with a straw pulled from the broom. The kitchen was noisy with the clatter of kettles and brooding silence between Mr. and Mrs. Bertrand.

Mr. Bertrand jerked up his pants. "What's the matter," he grumbled, "can't you ever make anything dainty?"

"Dainty!" muttered Mrs. Bertrand as she walked to the hall door. "I guess Mae Welland has learned her lesson, all right."

A spot of six o'clock sunlight reddened her long pointed nose. Her complaining voice shrilled—"V-i-d-a, you come right down here and set the table."

Vida sat crosslegged on the grass rug in her bedroom, a blue and white bowl of cherry pits and stems beside her. She clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back against the white bedspread and stared at the silvery cream papered ceiling. Her nose planed straight down from a broad forehead as though leveled by a sculptor's tool. A full lower lip and round chin gave her a pouting but not 50