Oswald said, "Father said we couldn't have much of a Christmas for secret reasons, and he said he had told Matilda to make us a plain pudding."
The plain pudding instantly cast its shadow over the deepening gloom of our young minds.
"I wonder how plain she'll make it?" Dicky said.
"As plain as plain, you may depend," said Oswald. "A here-am-I-where-are-you pudding—that's her sort."
The others groaned, and we gathered closer round the fire till the newspapers rustled madly.
"I believe I could make a pudding that wasn't plain, if I tried," Alice said. "Why shouldn't we?"
"No chink," said Oswald, with brief sadness.
"How much would it cost?" Noël asked, and added that Dora had twopence and H.O. had a French halfpenny.
Dora got the cookery-book out of the dresser drawer, where it lay doubled up among clothes-pegs, dirty dusters, scallop shells, string, penny novelettes, and the dining-room corkscrew. The general we had then—it seemed as if she did all the cooking on the cookery-book instead of on the baking-board, there were traces of so many bygone meals upon its pages.
"It doesn't say Christmas pudding at all," said Dora.