"Come to bed," he murmured gently, "and get that light out."
Half undressed she looked carefully at herself in the mirror of the perfectly made, solid, everlasting Victorian wardrobe. Yes, her face showed evidence of illness; it frightened her. No, she was merely indisposed; she was frightening herself. She had no pain, or extremely little. She thought, as she regarded herself in the glass, how inscrutable, how enigmatic, how feminine she was, and how impossible it was for him to comprehend her. She felt superior to him, as a complex mind to a simple one. She thought that she, far better than he, could appreciate the significance of the terrible day. She was overwhelmed by it. Situations were evolving one out of another. Nothing had happened, and yet all was changed. The night was twenty years away from the morning.
"Do you know about that girl?" he asked with soft weariness when she had slipped into bed and the light was out.
"No. Elsie? What?"
"She's eaten two-thirds of the cheese in the cage—at least two-thirds. Must have eaten it before she went out."
The "cage" was the wire-netted larder hung outside the kitchen window. Henry had taken to buying cheese, because it was as nourishing as meat, and cheaper. He had "discovered" cheese as a food—especially a food for servants. Violet said no word, but she sighed. She was staggered, deeply discouraged, by this revelation of Elsie's incredible greed and guile; it was a blow that somehow finished her off.
"Yes," Henry went on, and his mild voice passed through the darkness into Violet's ear with an uncanny effect. "I happened to go up into the kitchen just before I came to bed." (And he had not rushed back to tell her of the calamity. He had characteristically kept it to ripen in his brain. And how characteristic of him to wander ferreting into the kitchen! Naught could escape his vigilance.) "Did you see her when she came home?"
"Yes. She went straight to bed."
A silence.
"Something will have to be done about that girl," he said at length.