“You’ve made up for it later, then,” said Elsie pertly. “The aunts never come here but they find fault with things, and Aunt Ada cries, and I’m sure you and Aunt Gertie go at it hammer and tongs.”
“Don’t you dare to speak to me like that, Elsie Palmer,” said her mother abstractedly. (“Give me a spoon, there’s a good gurl.”) “What you gurls are coming to, talking so to your own mother, is more than I can say. What’s at the bottom of all this talk about carrying tea to Geraldine? What are you going to do about your own supper?”
“Have it in here. I don’t want much, anyway. I’m not hungry. Tea and bread-and-jam’ll do.”
“Please yourself,” said Mrs. Palmer.
She was a large, shapeless woman, slatternly and without method, chronically aggrieved because she was a widow with two daughters, obliged to support herself and them by receiving boarders, whom she always spoke of as guests.
“Where are these what-you-may-call-’ems—these Williamses—coming from?” Elsie asked, while she was jerking tea from the bottom of a cocoa-tin into a broken earthenware tea-pot.
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” said her mother.
She had no slightest reason to conceal the little she knew of the new people who were coming, but it was her habit to reply more or less in this fashion, semi-snubbing, semi-facetious, whenever either of her daughters asked a question.
“I’m sure I don’t want to know,” said Elsie, also from habit.
She made the tea, poured out two cups-full and took one upstairs. As she had expected, the alarm clock on the wash-stand showed it to be eight o’clock.