“I ask for a second helping,” said old Miss Lillicrap triumphantly. “I ask for it. And I get it, too. I had two helpings of the pudding yesterday, and I sent the girl back for some custard. She brought it to me without any custard the second time, but I sent her back for it. It was the disobliging waitress, too, not Irene, and I could see she didn’t like it. But she had to go back for the custard, and Miss Nettleship gave it to her. She knew it was for me, and she didn’t dare to refuse it.”
No one congratulated Miss Lillicrap on her achievement. She was very unpopular, and it was evident that to most of the boarders the recollection sprang to mind vividly of the methods to which she had recourse for the maintenance of her privileges. Indeed, Miss Nettleship had herself told Lydia of her own defeat at the aged but determined hands of Miss Lillicrap, who had once had five cardiac attacks in succession sooner than pay a disputed item on her weekly bill, emerging from each one in order to say, “It’s extortionate, and you’ll have to take it off. I shan’t pay.”
When she had said it five times, and showed an iron intention of relapsing into a sixth catalepsy, as a preliminary to saying it again, the manageress had cast up her eyes to heaven, and exclaimed that the charge should be remitted.
Thereafter Miss Lillicrap had the upper hand, and knew it, and Miss Nettleship was wont to say pleadingly to her other boarders:
“You know what it is—Miss Lillicrap is old, and then with her heart and all——”
They resented it, but they also were powerless before those tiny, gnarled hands, that little puckered face nodding and shaking under a lace cap, and that cracked, envenomed old voice.
“I wish there was less custard and more pudding, very often,” said Mr. Bulteel, with a sort of gloomy humorousness. “It’s always custard.”
“Made with custard powder at that,” put in his wife.
“Eggs are so expensive,” Mrs. Clarence’s habitual little whine contributed to the quota.
“Not that we don’t pay enough for her to give us real custard made with eggs,” she added hastily, lest it should be thought that she was accustomed to economical shifts.