“No hurry. Rest a bit, you poor girl! By Jove! That was a beastly scene! No wonder you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset now,” she said, quietly. “A person like that couldn’t affect me very much.”
And with a splendid Defoe grandeur, she went about her work.
As had her grandmother and Frankie, so did Lionel admire her housekeeping. Because she was always busy and always wearing an apron, he believed that she must accomplish an incredible amount of work. There was a great deal of dust about, the meals were always late and often burned, but that all went to prove what a lot there was to be done. She was so hurried, so anxious, always thinking of his comfort.
And nothing but his comfort. Never of his soul, his spirit. She got the dinner on the table and sat down opposite, watching with a frown to see that he ate enough. She still wore her apron, and her hair was very untidy, but he was used to that now. Anyway he felt that he must never look upon Minnie with physical eyes, he was to treasure her only for her sublime moral worth, her self-sacrifice, her stern sense of duty, her noble womanhood.
“Eat the pudding, dear,” she urged. “It’s all made of milk. It will do you good.”
He smiled at her and obeyed.
After dinner she made him sit in his comfortable chair on the porch with a cigar, while she washed the dishes. She would never let him help her. Pale and exhausted, doing everything in the most irrational way, it was quite nine o’clock before she could join him.
At last she came out on the porch and sat down near him, creaking back and forth in her particular rocking-chair. Out of the darkness her voice came suddenly and amazingly.
“I suppose we’ll have to patch it up.”