"The trouble with servants is that they always think that if you like a thing one day you'll like the same thing every day for the next three years."
"Ay," he said, drily. "I used to like a kidney, but it's more than three years ago." He stuck his lips out, and raised himself higher than ever on his toes.
He did not laugh. But she laughed, almost boisterously.
"I can't help telling you," she said, "you're perfectly lovely, great-stepuncle. Are we both going to drink out of the same cup?" In such manner did the current of her talk gyrate and turn corners.
"No, no!" She sprang up. "Let me. I'll do that, as the servant is so long."
And she opened the cupboard. Among a miscellany of crocks therein was a blue-and-white cup and saucer, and a plate to match underneath it, that seemed out of place there. She lifted down the pile.
"Steady on!" he counselled her. "Why dun you choose that?"
"Because I like it," she replied, simply.
He was silenced. "That's a bit o' real Spode," he said, as she put it on the table and dusted the several pieces with a corner of the tablecloth.
"It won't be in any danger," she retorted, "until it comes to be washed up. So I'll stop afterwards and wash it up myself. There!"
"Now you can't find the teaspoons, miss!" he challenged her.
She raised the tablecloth at the end, discovered the knob of a drawer, and opened it. And, surely, there were teaspoons.
"Can't I just take a peep into the scullery?" she begged, with a bewitching supplication. "I won't stop. It's nearly time your servant was back, if she's always so dreadfully prompt as you say. I won't touch anything. Servants are so silly. They always think one wants to interfere with them."
Without waiting for James's permission, she burst youthfully into the scullery.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "there's some one here!"
Of course there was. There was Mrs. Butt.
Although the part played by Mrs. Butt in the drama was vehement and momentous, it was nevertheless so brief that a description of Mrs. Butt is hardly called for. Suffice it to say that she had so much waist as to have no waist, and that she possessed both a beard and a moustache. This curt catalogue of her charms is unfair to her; but Mrs. Butt was ever the victim of unfairness.