"Well, I'll see, moms. I won't promise."
Hilda sighed and dished up the potatoes. For all her slim, frail fairness, Anne was very difficult to manage. As Belle said, "You never know when you're going to strike one of Anne's principles. They're like deep sea mines, unsuspected till they go off under you." Hilda carried the roast into the dining-room, Anne followed with the potatoes, and they sat down to dinner. In silence they began to eat.
Through the glass of the mantel above the gas log, wreathed in asbestos moss, Anne watched her father. He was a small man with thin, gray hair and brown eyes, faded from long years of figuring in bad lights. He bent low over his plate, but ate slowly, through habit acquired in an attack of nervous indigestion when Anne and Belle were children. There was little general conversation at the Mitchell meals, although, when James Mitchell was in a good humor, he was inclined to deliver monologues, chiefly against Radicalism and the Catholic Church. Any newspaper mention of the possibility of a strike precipitated the first, which before its finish, by some complicated process of logic, always included the second.
In the office of the Coast Electric Company, where he had been an assistant bookkeeper for thirty years, James Mitchell was known as one of the most faithful men they had. He never took a vacation nor objected to overtime. He had a tremendous respect for every one in authority above him, and the only temper the office had ever seen him display was when one of the younger clerks had tried to organize a clerks' union. James Mitchell had thrown down his pencil, whirled upon the astonished organizer, and demanded to know "where the city would have been if it hadn't been for the men who started this company?" Apparently he considered that the city would still have been using candles. For this act of faith he had been raised five dollars shortly after.
He disliked open conflict and in the early days of his marriage had once left the house to escape the first real discussion between himself and Hilda on the subject of money. This astonishing act had for years hung over the home, and the fear that "papa would take his hat and go out" had been held as an extinguisher over the children's quarrels and suffocated any tendency Anne or Belle might have had to appeal to him.
Anne could never remember an age when either she or Belle had talked to him of their own accord, although there had been periods when her mother, driven by some hidden impulse, had insisted that they "go and talk to papa. Tell him about school; he likes to hear it." At thirteen Belle had refused, and Anne, three years younger, had managed to slip from the obligation at the same time.
They finished the meat and vegetables in safe silence and Hilda gathered up the dishes, hopeful of peace to the end. But the heavy stillness had weighted Anne's already taut nerves, and when her mother returned with brown betty and hard sauce, and her father came suddenly to consciousness of the elaborate nature of this week-day dinner with a remark on the price of butter and sugar, Anne's hands went cold and her face flamed.
"Well, we don't have it often," Hilda propitiated, "but sometimes it gives one a headache trying to think of changes, everything's so high."
"And going higher." He helped himself sparingly to the hard sauce and pushed it across to Anne, who smothered her pudding in it. "And it'll keep on going up, too, unless people stop buying. Women could bring down the prices in a minute if they had the sense. Nobody needs hard sauce."
"They do," Anne spoke quietly without looking up. Her mother tried to touch her foot under the table, but Anne moved just beyond reach. Hilda began to eat her betty.