"Why, Doad, I never heard you talk like that before," said Halse, with a look of surprise.
"No more did I," remarked Addison. "Theodora, I am scandalized."
"I know it is horrid," she replied. "But I have thought it, if I never have said it, many and many a time, when I've nearly roasted myself over the hot stove, this summer, and thought I had enough cooked to last two days, at least; and then in would march you three hungry boys, to table, and eat it all up, eat my whole panful of doughnuts and finish off with eight or ten cookies apiece, just because they were good, or a little better than usual. If they had been a little poorer they would have lasted two days, surely."
"Doad, you are getting positively wicked," said Addison. "I don't see what has come over you. You are not yourself."
"She is only telling the cold truth," exclaimed Kate. "Boys all seem to think that victuals grow ready cooked in the house somewheres, and that the more they can eat the better it ought to suit us. Here's Tom, a pretty good sort of boy generally, but he will come into the pantry, after he has been racing about out-of-doors, and commit ravages that it will take me hours of hot, hateful work to repair. Oh, he is a perfect pantry scourge, a doughnut-and-cooky terror! Why, I have had what I knew must be half a big panful of doughnuts, or cookies, enough for supper and breakfast, certainly; and then about three or four o'clock of a hot August afternoon, I would hear Tom's boots clumpering in the pantry, and by the time I would get there, he would be just sneaking out, grinning like a Chessy-cat, with his old mouth full and his pockets bulging out. I will look in my pan and there will not be enough left to put on a plate once! Then I know I have got to build a fire, get on my old floury apron and go at it again, when I've just got cool and comfortable, after my day's work!
"When he does that, I sometimes think I don't know whether I love him well enough to cook for him, or not. For when he is hungry and comes tearing in like that, he will carry off more than he can eat. His eyes want all he sees. He will carry off lots more than he can possibly eat; I've found it, time and again, laid up out in the wood-shed; and once I found eight of my doughnuts hid in a hole in the garden wall. He thought that he could eat the whole panful, but found that he couldn't."
"Oh, that was only laying up a store against days of famine," said Tom, calmly. "Some days the pantry is awfully bare; and Kate, too, has a caper of hiding the victuals. I call that a plaguey mean trick—when a fellow's hungry! I clear the pan when I do find it, to get square with her."
"Well," Addison remarked, "the girls have presented their side of the work pretty strongly; but I rather guess the boys could say something on their side;—how they have to work in the hot sun, all day long, to plough and harrow and sow and plant and hoe the crops, to get the bread stuff to cook into food. The girls want cooked victuals, too, as well as we. The hot, hard work isn't all on one side."
"That's so!" echoed Tom and Halse, fervently.
"I often come in tired, hot and sweaty after a drink of water, in the sweltering summer afternoons, and find our girls in the cool sitting-room, rocking by the windows, looking as comfortable as you please, reading novels," continued Addison.