Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/268

 subdue its annoyances because dear Gertrude had seen to every tiresome detail—the packing, ordering the food, shipping trunks, buying tickets, giving orders timidly to servants—in short, doing all the things which might have broken in upon the spiritual quiet of the Great Religious Experimenter. It had become a system so thorough and so monotonous that Mrs. Weatherby had quite forgotten the grey existence of such troublesome details. Now that her slave was gone, her life collapsed about her ears in a confusion of petty annoyances.

Margharita wanted to know what Giovanni should bring from the market. The men who were building a cesspool found that the cement was of the wrong kind. Should Giovanni buy a new tire for the Ford? Lulu, the elder Pomeranian, spit up her breakfast. There was no more sunflower seed for Anubis. It was as if Mrs. Weatherby's star had slipped into some profoundly disastrous conjunction. She remembered with terror that her horoscope foretold disaster and disappointments during the six months beginning with August.

And she was forced to face and solve all these calamities while suffering the greatest anguish of mind. Had she not been betrayed by the one creature on whom for twenty years she had lavished the wealth of affection and kindness of a mother? For twenty years she had been harboring an ingrate, nay, a viper, at her bosom. She kept saying this over and over again to herself while she squabbled with Margharita and dosed Lulu with castor oil. And all those cruel things which Gertrude had said the night before. She must have been thinking