While she talked Ellen was bustling capably about, laying a cloth, getting out dishes, dropping Joan's batter into a sizzling saucepan, from whence arose dense, pleasing vapors.
"Here, Joan, mix some cinnamon in that sugar, 'less you'd ruther have molasses on 'em. You ought to see the room he's got. Nothin' but books, all over the tables, piled up on the floor, even on the window-sills—"
"Books?" said Joan, pricking up an ear. She had not imagined the wide-eared young man in his dapper clothes a student.
"Whatever people want all them books around for I can't see," said Ellen. "Dust collectors, I call 'em; but he says they're his college career. Always will have his joke! And the dirt—! He had a colored woman in to do for him before I come, and guess what she used to do with her dust?" She paused dramatically, arms akimbo.
Joan admitted her imagination unequal to the task.
"Swept it under the bed and left it there! Land!" said Ellen Neal, "how I do hate a nigger! You can bet I got that place to rights in a jiffy."
"I can indeed," murmured Joan, "and I can also bet he couldn't find a thing belonging to him for a week afterwards."
Ellen grinned. "You've the truth of it. There wasn't a morning for about a week but what he'd thump on the floor and yell down the chimney, 'Mrs. Neal, oh, Mrs. Neal! For heaven's sake where is my blue necktie?' or, 'In the name of Jehoshaphat, what have you done with my other pair of pants?' It kind of reminded me of your pa," she said, sighing. "I been lookin' after him ever sence. There now, ain't you goin' to eat your pancakes now you've got 'em?"
Joan drew up her chair to the oil-cloth covered table, and, despite the heat and her troubles, made such a meal as she had not eaten for weeks at her step-mother's elaborate board. Ellen sat opposite her, with no servant-and-mistress nonsense to complicate the pleasure of hospitality. Sometimes the old woman waited on Joan, and sometimes Joan waited on Ellen, all in a friendly democracy that would have caused Major Darcy's hair to rise on end. It had been his conscientious effort for years to keep Ellen Neal "in her place." The difficulty was in the ups and downs of the Darcy ménage to know just what might be considered Ellen's place.
Not troubling themselves with any such niceties of status, the two ate their pancakes and drank their lemonade and otherwise courted indigestion contentedly, meanwhile chatting about the young man from upstairs, who for some reason began to appeal to Joan's imagination. His name, it appeared, was Archibald Blair.