“A telephone in Mr. Hibbert Mearely’s antic an’ aristocratical home is what I’ll never get accustomed to.” Amanda drew her lips down in displeasure. “He’d never have permitted it.”
“Answer it, if you please, Amanda.” Mrs. Mearely lifted her head with an air that became her well, despite her tears.
“Answer it, Jemima,” the elder sister commanded, noting, with a glitter of satisfaction, that her alleged “mistress’s” eyes flashed angrily. By such subtleties did Amanda remind milady, when necessary, that, while “His Friggets” would do whatever was to be expected of servants in Villa Rose, neither would take personal orders—above all, if given as such—from the farmer’s daughter of Poplars Vale.
“I don’t mind obligin’ you, Amanda,” Jemima responded, with a certain pointedness.
“There won’t be anyone there to answer, if you don’t hurry,” Rosamond said sharply. Perhaps it was the liberating influence of her white cuffs and fichu; perhaps it was because the early morning sun and breeze on a midsummer day have a rapture of their own which is communicable and urges gay defiance of all convention; but, whatever the cause, Rosamond Mearely was aware that, although she had been irked aforetime, never had she felt the oppressiveness of the Frigget sorority as she felt it at that moment. Inwardly she was thinking:
“I couldn’t discharge them. They wouldn’t go. Or, if they did leave, they’d make it impossible for me to live in Roseborough. But if a wicked tramp were to come by and I paid him a lot of money, and he murdered them for me...?”
Mrs. Mearely’s assassination reverie was cut short by woeful wails from Jemima at the telephone.
“Oh! Mercy! Amanda! oh...!”
It was only on extreme occasions that Amanda indulged in profanity. She did so now.
“Jemima! What in all sassafras is the matter with you?” she demanded sternly as her sister reeled into the room.