"Perhaps it seems so, sir," she said. "Will that be all for to-night?"
"Yes. No," he added hastily, "I have one more thing to say to you, Jane-Ellen, and it's this. Don't make the mistake of fancying that I have taken this whole incident lightly. I don't. It really must not happen again. Understand that clearly."
"You mean if that gentleman came back, you would dismiss me, sir?"
"I think I would," he answered.
"Even if it weren't my fault?"
"Was the fault entirely his, Jane-Ellen?"
"Ask him, sir."
"You know much more about it than he does. Was the fault entirely his?"
The cook wriggled her shoulders, crumpled her apron and seemed unwilling to answer a direct question directly. At last an idea occurred to her. She looked up brightly.
"It was the ice-cream, sir," she said. "I was trying to teach him how to freeze ice-cream slowly. It ought to be done like this." And bending over an imaginary freezer, she imitated with her absurdly small hand the suave, gentle, rotary motion essential to the great American luxury.