Her father refused with horror to assume it. “Not on your life!” he cried. “You were the one who’d seen Mother do it.”
“Doesn’t the cook-book say how to do it anywhere?” asked Helen, trying to fall back on some one else. “There is a chapter at the end that tells you how to take out ink-stains and what to do for people who have got poisoned, and all sorts of things. Maybe it’ll say there.”
They laid down the egg to search, but found nothing in the four hundred pages of the big book that told them how to break a raw egg.
“Perhaps you could lay it down on a plate and cut it in two with a knife,” suggested Lester.
Even Helen knew better than this. She knew better than that when she was born, she thought, suppressing a pitying smile, “Gracious no! You would get the shell all mixed up with the insides,” she explained. They stared again at the egg.
To Helen came the knowledge that responsibility must be assumed.
“Somebody’s got to,” she said grimly. “I’ll try again.”
She took the egg in her hand and resolutely struck it a small blow on the edge of the bowl. The shell cracked a little.
“That sounds good,” said Lester; “give it another whack.”
She repeated the blow and, holding the egg up above her head till she could see the under side, reported that there was a perceptible crack and some wetness oozing out.