“Er—no—she’s tired. But Ethel, I can’t have you getting breakfast. I’ve already got one, and although it wasn’t a success, we’d better make it do. You look tired out after the excitement of last night. Let’s eat some berries and drink a glass of milk and wait for lunch. Wasn’t that burglar funny last night?”
“Philip, are you going to let Minerva stay in bed all day?” said Ethel.
I sat down on the kitchen table and said,
“Ethel, would you like to be waked up in the middle of the night and forced to prepare an extra meal? Minerva is a human being and she is tired. You’re a human being and you’re tired. Let us let Minerva spend this one day in bed taking the rest cure, and after we’ve eaten this second breakfast, which smells pretty good, we’ll spend the day out doors.”
“But Minerva is insubordinate.”
“Very well, let us call it that. Suppose we suppress her insubordination and she works for us all day and takes the evening train for New York, will the thought that we have suppressed insubordination in a cook get us a new servant? Insubordination in the city, where there are whole intelligence offices filled with girls looking for new places, is a thing that I can’t and won’t stand; but insubordination, with Mamie Logan sick with scarlet fever and no other girl in the world that I know of, is a thing to be coddled, as you might say. Call it weariness caused by over-service and it immediately becomes a thing that we can pardon. Do you want to pack up and go back to New York?”
Ethel assured me that she did not.
“Well, then, don’t let us talk any more about insubordination. We’ll eat what you set before us, asking no questions, and then we’ll go out for a long walk.”
We went out for a long walk, and both of us succeeded by sheer will power in forgetting that Minerva existed. We made believe that we could live on the delicious air that blew so gently at us, and for two or three hours we wandered or sat still, or Ethel sketched and we were thoroughly happy.
It was about noon when we returned to the house. We heard loud voices and stopped to listen.