Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/143

 nentinent [sic] cheek-bones, lustily stirring a mixture in a brown crockery bowl on the table before her. She did not desist when confronted by her mistress, nor did she invite her to sit down. Was it etiquette, Campaspe demanded of herself, for a cook in her own domain to request her employer to seat herself? She listened to the cook's complaint, which included a diatribe against the scullery-maid whose belief in Christian Science made her presence distasteful to the cook who was a Catholic. The waitress, it appeared, had a policeman keeping company with her, and Frederika occasionally helped herself to a nip of sherry. These denunciations were delivered in a belligerent fashion and accompanied by a prodigious stirring of the mixture in the bowl which, Campaspe realized with a sort of awe, was something she herself would be eating later in the day. The performance was concluded with a florid peroration of some length in which the cook summed up her troubles and cried, Them or me goes, standing arms akimbo, the great wooden spoon stuck out at a right angle, so that it suggested some mysterious medizval weapon. Never previously, Campaspe assured herself, had she known so much about the private lives of her servants. It gave her the impression that she was a feudal lord dispensing justice to his serfs. Nevertheless, she recognized her impotence. She could scarcely limit the choice of the waitress in the matter of young men, nor could she instruct the scullery-maid to alter her faith.